Capped herons are some of the most enigmatic species found in the lowland rainforests of the Amazon rainforest. However the only way to get them low on the river bed is to visit the area during a low tide, meaning when the water level is low, and the birds try to make the best of the low water levels to hunt.
Location
I shot this photo in the Napo wildlife reserve in the Amazon area of Ecuador. It takes approximately 40 minutes to fly from Quito to the small town of Coca,where our speed boat takes us into the Yasuni community. From there, we row a paddle boat for 40 more minutes to reach our location.
Preparing The Scene
I usually visit the Amazon of Ecuador every year during January and February. Around this time, we have favorable lighting conditions and, if lucky, we get the low tide which brings water birds like herons close to the shore. All photography in this area must be done from a row boat, however, as the rivers are full of piranhas, caimans and anacondas (for real)!
Composing The Shot
Capped herons are very shy birds and, at most times, prefer to stay far from humans. However, in this case, my boat driver was an experienced guide from the Kichwa community and knew exactly how to get close to it. Once our boat was at the optimum distance for my 600mm, I tried to get as low as I could to the water level in order to capture this image. However, I realized that I was missing the reflection, when I did that, so I chose an angle where I could get natural one., and the way to do it was to get parallel to the bird as seen in the image below.
Lighting
In terms of lighting, I only had the option of natural light given our location, equipment, and the nature of the bird’s temprament toward humans.
Post Processing
This is how my image straight out of my camera looked like straight out of the camera:
As always, the first plan is to take care of the raw file and process to get it as close as possible to the final image.
To get depth in the image I dropped the exposure and highlights. I added vibrance to the image to get more out of the green and blue tones on the bird’s head
Next, I opened the raw file to edit in Photoshop.
I ran Auto Contrast to get the depth you see.
Next, I wanted to fix some elements on the left of the image. I selected the bird , inversed the selection, and selected the paint brush . Set it to soft round and changed hardness to 0.
This is how the selection looks during this step.
Now, I chose a black brush at 60% opacity and started painting the background to hide the branches.
Once that was finished, I had to crop the image to get a nice composition. I chose the original image ratio, which was 3:2, and got ride of some unnecessary elements to the right.
Once this was done, my image was ready for resize and sharpness as the last steps. I resized the file to my desired online posting size of 1800 pixels on the longer side. I then and then ran a Smart Sharpen at 65%.
The process to convert file to sRGB and saving remains the same, as always.
About The Bird
This medium-sized heron is aptly named after its distinguishable black cap that is in sharp contrast to its long white head plumes and a completely white body. Another distinctive feature is their blue-grey bill with a reddish center and yellow or grey tip. Unlike other herons, its neck is thicker and has a variable shade of cream. However, during the nesting season the color of the head, neck, chest, and under the wings becomes tinged in yellow and buff, the neck gets a deep cream color and the blue hue turns cobalt. There is no sexual dimorphism. A resident of Orinoco and Amazon is found feeding alone or loosely joining a large flock at forest swamps and flies with shallow wing beats like a parrot.
