Sandpipers, Little Talbot Island, Fl . This one should be fertile ground for critiques. N70, Sigma 400, Elite 200

-- Larry Korhnak (lvk@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), April 12, 1999

Answers

Very nice shot, with one simple flaw: the plane of focus appears to lie on the body of one of the following birds. If the eye of the foreground sandpiper were in focus, I would like the image much better.

-- Mark Erickson (maericks@netcom.com), April 12, 1999.

Larry, I like the flurry of blurry (a rhyme!) at the bottom of the picture a lot. I agree with Mark about the focus; but I see what you were going after and it's a noble effort! I think I would crop the top some more also.

-- Mike Green (mgprod@mindspring.com), April 12, 1999.

The shot has a nice feel to it. It has a good angle of view and nice color, but IMO the obvious lack of focus and the blown out white breasts of the leading birds render it to low quality. These little guys are so hard to capture in a pleasing situation, especially when they are on the move as they are here. It seems as if they are moving 200 miles an hour in the viewfinder. This is a splendid attempt at an extremely difficult shot to capture. Unfortunately, this type of shooting will fill your trash can long before it will fill a slide page of keepers. Very good effort!

-- Rob Pailes (rpailes@peganet.com), April 12, 1999.

Larry,

I love the angle of this shot - its not often that you can see blue sky through the legs of sandpipers (sanderlings). The fact that you caught these guys in motion adds to the degree of difficulty in achieving perfect focus immensely. Though not technically perfect, this shot has a very nice feel to it.

Peter

-- Peter May (peter.may@stetson.edu), April 13, 1999.

Thanks for the critiques so far. Seems there is agreement on my self critique, "nice try, but no cigar". This should have hit the waste basket but it represented an hour or so of belly crawling. The sandpipers didn't want nothing to do with me following them around with a tripod. However, I was able to get much closer doing a turtle or beached whale imitation. I'll keep trying!

-- Larry Korhnak (lvk@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), April 13, 1999.

This is a great photo. Love it. It makes me feel like I'm walking with the birds. Wonderful.

-- Gary Whalen (whalen@circle.net), April 15, 1999.