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| Spoonbill at Work |
The Spoonbills have beaks resembling spoons (hence the name). They fish tiny creatures from the water using these beaks. To support their large bodies, they do that for hours on end. This Spoonbill was demonstrating this for me for a while, and was unafraid of me catching a low position right near the end of the lake to take some photos of it working. It paid off. In this photo, if you enlarge, you can see the tiny creature it caught being reigned in by the Spoonbill (it's at about 80% of the way to the throat).
What do I like about this photo? The low angle of view, combined with the open aperture (f/6.3 - the most open my lens allows at this focal length), allows very good separation between the subject and the background. You can see the Spoonbill in focus, along with the water droplets and the caught food, but everything else is blurred out. I like the pose and the action. Also, the sun is behind the Spoonbill which makes the water droplets light up, and the outline of the bird light up as well.
What would I want to improve? The sunlight was pretty harsh here, so the photo is almost all-white. Some more color would have been nice, especially for the water. That would have made for a photo with more contrast, and even better separation of the subject from the background.