At the time I photographed these Loons, they had paired up for breeding, but had not yet made a nest. Then, over the course of the next two months, they built a nest, laid eggs, incubated and hatched the eggs, and raised a loonlet to fledging. They had laid two eggs, but the other loonlet was killed and eaten by a Bald Eagle just a couple days after hatching. Nature is both beautiful and harsh.
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3 Comments
Gorgeous photo and heart wrenching story.
Glad he did not come back for the second loonet, I've seen predators come back over and over for every last baby. Life is tough in the wild.
Tom, are you favoring "sweet spot" aperture here, personally I feel the image could use more DOF.
Hey Paul, thanks for commenting!
I definitely wanted the Loon in the back to be soft, soft enough that it would be obvious that it wasn't supposed to be in focus. I'm concerned that if I had used a smaller aperture with more depth of field, then that background Loon would be sharper than it is now, and to me, that would not be very pleasing, visually. I mean if they were both sharp that would just look horrible.
To my eye, the degree to which that background Loon is blurred is absolutely perfect, so I would not change anything, even if I could. But of course your preferences may be different, inasmuch as what you think looks right.
300-800mm f5.6 lens stopped down to f8 and zoomed to 572mm, no cropping of the image that was recorded on a full frame sensor