Where I've been and what I've learned along the way…
While sitting down to breakfast we witnessed this scene of “nature, red in tooth and claw.” A Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) had captured a Pied-Billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) and was strangling it to death. The smaller bird would briefly struggle and flap its wings, but the outcome seemed certain. After a few minutes the Heron flew off with its catch. Apparently this is a common hazard for small grebes.
This is my first attempt at blending an HDR photo to remove the halo artifact that that frequently appears where the sky meets hard edges. In the photo below I did my best to minimize the halo with highlight smoothing in Photomatix, but it is still there.
Here is the same photo after masking the sky and blending it with the -2 RAW exposure. Much improved!
