It’s 7:26 AM, do you know where your Egrets and Herons are ?
The clouds were pretty thick for most of the early morning so instead of trying to venture out onto the wildlife drive to photograph birds in the early morning hours, I opted for an alternative strategy. I noticed rays of sun trying to burst out from places in the cloud cover so I changed heads on my tripod and grabbed my Sigma 10-20mm lens, cable release and Cokin Pro-Z filter set and climbed to the top of the observation tower at the end of the Gull Pond. From there I was given great 360 views and set this shot up so that when the sun did finally burst through, I was ready to capture it.
I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames with a Cokin Pro-Z Neutral Density ND-4 filter and a Tobacco gray 2 filter mounted to combat the sun’s strong oncoming rays and bring out some of the color of the marsh. I then combined those frames into an HDR with Photomatix Pro and then, tone mapped that image to create an output image.
