As per my last posting, this image was also photographed at Lake Parker State Recreation Area, Lakeland, Florida. Every evening (and some mornings) my friend and I would set up shop on the edge of the lake and observe the interactions at the nest. This was done over a period of a month or so, so I went through a lot of film. Well, one evening we were lucky enough to witness a feeding. When the adult returned, the juvenille immediately began to grab at the adult's bill, aggressively demanding food. The adult then proceeded to regurgitate a partially digested fish. The juvenille assumed the position shown and waited for it's meal. After many unsuccessful attempts to swallow the fish, the juvenille had to give up. It was just to large. The adult had to reswallow it to further digest the young heron's dinner for him. It was actually quite humerous watching the young heron attempting to eat the large fish. He would hop around squawking trying to pick it up. you could tell that he was quite frustrated.

Canon Rebel G, Tamron 100-300mm (@300) with 2x extender, Provia 100F

-- Jason Stiner (jstiner@ene.com), August 23, 2000

Answers

The image itself isn't really that compelling. You have a great story, but the image doesn't seem to fit it (unless I'm missing something, the fish you're talking about isn't in the shot).

I definitely have problems with the poor quality of the scan, a pet peeve of mine. The comment I made on your earlier post can easily be transferred to this image: your scans do not have to be as small as 15kb, they just have to be under 50kb. Indeed, your images should not be as small as they have been unless you enjoy losing image quality. There is little detail on either bird due to the loss in sharpness, and the large scale of JPEG compression leaves the edges of the birds littered with sprites (the little squiggles in the sky adjoining the birds -- a sure sign of over-compression).

Improving one's scanning technique can be a pain, but it's a necessary evil if one wishes to look good on the Internet. The best pictures can easily be ruine by bad scanning. Your last image was striking enough that the bad scan was easy to overlook; in this one, it's the most noticeable feature.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), August 24, 2000.