Great Blue Heron

One of my favorite birds is the Great Blue Heron. It's such an interesting bird for photographing. These were taken at Standley Lake Regional Park this past weekend. The park hosts a protected area where many birds (herons, pelicans, etc.) nest.

This photograph was made using a Nikon D810 and a Nikkor 200-500mm lens, with a Nikkor 1.7x extender, giving a total focal length of 850mm. I've found the extender (a TC-17EII) to give soft focus wide open, so I stop it down and settle for more noise at the higher ISO settings needed. I had vibration reduction engaged on the big lens in Normal mode and used autofocus - although I did manually adjust the focus through the lens. Supposedly autofocus doesn't work well with this extender-lens combo that I used.

Shot at 1-400 sec, f-14, ISO-800. The camera was tripod mounted at the time, but the head was not tightened so I was free to swivel it around. The D810 and 200-500mm lens is a heavy combination, so mounting it on the tripod and leaving it free to move was needed over the hour I was at the site.
Read less