I’ve had a pretty stressful few months work-wise so when I was given the opportunity to chill out by my brothers pool for a few days I took him up on his offer. The first night I slept extremely bad and was up for the day by around 3:30. Thinking quickly, I thought back to my NYIP (NY Institute of Photography) courses and all of my issues of Outdoor Photographer and decided to head out with my camera.

One of my favorite subjects is birds, I particularly love Egrets. They’re a very skittish bird that fears pretty much everything. If you make noise or sudden movements, they’re gone. I was in one of my favorite birding hangouts out in Orient, NY (the tip of the north fork of Long Island) when I came upon this scene — 3 Egrets getting themselves ready for breakfast and the day. This shot illustrates a couple of good outdoor photography points, in particular that early morning is a GREAT time to get a pretty cool shot.

In the shot below, you’ll notice the soft bluish tone to the photo, you can’t get that tone during with the blazing sun to your back. I took this shot over 3.2 seconds so these guys were pretty still. I wanted to use a very small aperture to make sure that I got some great details about their surroundings (the shore behind the birds is about 3/4 of a mile away).

Egret Morning

The lesson from this shot — early morning light (this was actually about 1/2 hour before official sunrise) or late day light is the best for taking effective outdoor shots. The critters are active (or like in this case just waking up getting ready to be active).