Riverfront Park - September 27, 2018

I went out to Riverfront Park on the afternoon of September 27, 2018 with the rest of Mark's Digital Photography class to shoot birds. The lighting was nice and diffused from the clouds, and despite the cold wind and occasionally sprinkling rain, it was a very productive shoot and I got lots of good pictures.

One of my favorite pictures is of this goose getting ready to land on Lake Josephine. I was in Aperture priority mode, and had my ISO set at 100. To minimize the shutter speed and freeze the motion of the goose, I went to an aperture of 5.6. The result is quite pleasing and the goose was well framed. There is some motion blur on the outer wings (especially the wingtips) that could have been eliminated by shooting at a faster speed (probably in Shutter priority, which I later switched to for the rest of the shoot), but I kind of like it because it gives a dynamic feel to the picture. I removed three ducks from the perimeter of the picture using the heal tool--they were all partially cut off and distracted from the main subject. However, I left the group of geese in the background because they give depth to the shot. The main drawback of my picture is that the goose is too far to the left--it would have been better if it had room on the left side because it was flying in that direction.




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