Nazca Booby

[Wendy Kates]

This image was made in the Galapagos last winter. It was a challenge to correctly expose a white bird under the equatorial sun, and I think I only partially succeeded. I sharpened it minimally, increased the saturation of the beak, and dodged the left eye. Critiques are welcome.
Canon Rebel Xsi
70 - 200 f/4 lens at 185mm; f/4; 1/1000s; ISO 100; monopod

[Doug West]

Wendy...you have a great pose here, the exposure looks fine and the background
is great also. My only complaint is the shadow on the birds left.

Do you have a flash? Even if the sun is out in full strength you should have your
flash nearby. It'll help open up the shadows among other things.

This is still a fine image and a keeper.

Doug

[Bobo Madar]

It is a beautiful image.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Wendy, these are fun birds, but it's the Blue foot booby's I love.

I think the first issue is your DOF, it's too shallow, you needed to be f/9 or 11 subject to how close you were. You had the ISO and to crank it up would not have been an issue to retain a high shutter speed. The eyes look sharp, but the beak tails off sadly. Whites are always difficult here and you may be able to retrieve more detail from the RAW file providing it's not blown. Killer BKG and the subject stands out well. I think if you go back you can extract more from the image, plus adding some more sharpening. Depending on your POV you might also like to crop the BKG down. This is from your post and I hope it illustrates my points as there is more detail to come out.

cheers
Steve

[Wendy Kates]

Thanks, all, for your comments. Doug, I do not have a flash. As Steve's comments point out, I'm still mastering DOF, and I wanted to master the camera basics before tackling flashes (although I do see your point). Steve, I really like your crop. I went back to RAW, and was able to capture more detail in the whites, but I wasn't able to reproduce the way you sharpened the beak. Mine ended up looking dried out and cracked. Can you describe the steps you took to sharpen the image?

[Jeannean Ryman]

Nice capture Wendy of an unusual bird and head on look. Steve's repost bringing down the whites and bringing the beak more into focus is nice and agree with the assessment you both have pointed out. Shooting at f/4 this close, with the subject not in a parallel plane to the camera, will always have areas OOF. The closer you are to the subject, the more DOF you'll need.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Wendy, all I did was take it back into LR and adjusted a few areas to bring back the tone. That gave me something to work with when applying some USM, if you apply this in small amounts as an adjustment layer you can always reduce it if it's too strong via a mask. :w3

Steve

[Cody Conway]

Really great composition Wendy. Loving the background, it compliments and isolates the subject beautifully. As others have suggested the DOF is quite shallow for this shot. Just to recap, you can always increase your depth of field by widening your field of view (using a smaller focal length), giving yourself more distance between the subject and your sensor (backing up), and of course, closing up your Aperature F stop. For people who are just starting to learn how to predict Depth of Field, I always like to suggest googling a Depth of Field Calculator and just playing around with it to give you an idea of just how much can be infocus at a given set of parimeters. For example if your subject is 20 ft away and you use a 180mm lens with a selected f-stop of F/4 only .56 ft are in focus or just over 6". However, if you stopped this down to F/9 you would have 1.25 ft in your depth of field focal plane - or 15". All in all it's definitely a beautiful image with fantastic clarity on the eyes! Fantastic job.

[Wendy Kates]

Thanks, all, for your comments and help with DOF. I will definitely play around with the DOF calculator. I'm also wondering how the size of the subject affects DOF considerations. Am I correct that if this were a small finch rather than a large booby, and my distance to the subject were the same, shooting at f/4 wouldn't have been as much of a problem?

[Cody Conway]

Right on! Considering your subject size is important. If you are trying to get a bill of a booby in focus looking dead at you, you will need twice the needed depth of field in essence - think of it this way. Depth of field is given as the stuff in front AND behind the focal point that is in focus. So when I say the depth of field is 1.25 ft that means that you have 1.25 ft total or roughly 7.5" in front of the focus point and 7.5" behind the focus point. So a 6" long beak with the focus set to the eyes at its base would generate an excellent focus composition. Now lets consider the warbler. This bird is more more than 4" in total length. Again suggesting focal point as the eyes and given a nice angle of attack for your focal plane you should only need about 2-3" behind and 2-3" in front to get a full sharp range. So a total of 6" depth of field will nail it. However the problem with smaller birds is our desire to fill the entire frame forcing us to get closer which will again cut our DOF down. Sometimes even a warbler needs F/11 to get the right depth. But given equidistance in comparison to the booby you will do well with f4-6.3 depending on your angle relative to the bird and your sensor. Make sense?

Cheers!

[Wendy Kates]

Makes a lot of sense, Cody! Thank you!