January, the month of discoveries:

First I discovered that the best place to take pictures of herons is the zoo in Vienna where a couple of them decided to stay in the pond that be meant for the pelicans. I visited the zoo early in the morning because: 1. perfect light and 2. less visitors. The picture was hard to take and I needed some patience because a lot of seagulls and ducks swam around in the pond and into my frame. They were everywhere behind the heron. But then the moved out of the picture and for a second there was nothing but the heron in my viewfinder. I fired and got only two frames with no ducks or seagulls in it.

Second: That I did wrong by using JPEG instead of NEF ( RAW format on Nikon D-SLRs ). After one year of JPEG-shooting I discovered that I not used the full potential of my camera. If you are still shooting JPEG with you D-SLR read this: whyNEF

Picture was taken with Nikon D1 and 80-400VR handheld at 405 mm ( equ. ) with aperture set on f8 and 800ASA. Settings: EV -0.5, Cloudy -3 ( but corrected to shadow in Bibble ). The image is a 100% crop and I did no postprocessing except: I used NeatImage to reduce the noise, resized the image for the web and used Niksharpener to sharpen it..