Heron in the Green

As the temperatures crawled into the mid-50s today, I started thinking of visiting my feathered friends in a few weeks.  It's been a few weeks since I've opened up some of these programs, tough to get in the picture mood when the wind chill is at 0 and the days are so short.
I've not been totally forgetting about photography over the last few weeks.  I've done some work with a variable neutral density filter at a near by man made waterfall before it froze over.  If I elect to use a ND filter for my airshow work, at this time it won't be a VND.  I found a lot of color shift.  It could be fixed, but why add to the post processing.
Last weekend the sun was out on a Saturday, that I didn't have to do the real job, so I hit the road.  I hit a few lighthouses.  My plan was to take a number of JPG images and see how they compared to my processing of a RAW image.  Long story short, Nikon's JPG just doesn't do it for me.  My processing for anything I'd want to show still includes ACR so I'm not really saving that much time.  The RAW file size hasn't been an issue in the D7200 so far.  So unless I get trapped into some 'vacation' photos, I'll be shooting RAW.
So back to the Heron.  I like this image because it is busy.  Busy to me anyway.  Some of the image is artfully out of focus.  And the bird is in focus.  You can really see the yellow eye.

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I'm still a few weeks away from going to the Refuge, but the season is on the way.