American Avocet

[Grant Yang]

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qU-bjEc-xLo/Un8I4xMskJI/AAAAAAAAMt0/C1SCqN246UY/s1200/DSC02632.jpg

Camera: SONY
Model: SLT-A77V
ISO: 400
Exposure: 1/500 sec
Aperture: 5.6
Focal Length: 400mm
Flash Used: Yes (bare external ttl flash set to underexpose by 1-1.5 stops)
Focus Mode: AFC
Handheld

Taken at Baylands in Palo Alto. There wasn't a whole lot of activity on the sunlit side of the slough, so I tried to go for something more creative. The setting sun was breaking through the palm trees and reflecting on the water. I tried to get a shot of the avocet resting in the reflections. I tried to compensate for the avocet using fill flash. I had a hard time trying to find the balance between putting some light on my subject, and overdoing the flash and getting an artificial looking image.

The shot was processed using LR3. I adjusted the brightness, bumped clarity and vibrance, brought up the shadows a tad and dropped the darks to let the yellow reflections pop.

[Marina Scarr]

Lovely colors in the water, and I think you did pretty well with your flash work. I am seeing nice details in your feathers. My main issue is that your bird is centered and I feel your image would be more powerful with the bird more to the left of the frame (so cropping from the left). You might even wish to consider a vertical.

[Diane Miller]

The reflection and water in the lower part has a lovely painterly effect! Marina has a good point about cropping from the left a little, although the water there is beautiful, and I might consider a smidgen from the top, to get rid of the darkest areas up there.

The darks seem a little heavy for my taste. Have you looked at bringing them up a little? You don't want to turn them gray, but there should be a lot of leeway in the RAW conversion.

I'd recommend upgrading LR, for the newer tonal controls that were introduced in v4. You have much more leeway to dig out detail in darks and lights, almost to the point of HDR!

[Luis Patacao]

Hi Grant, really like the reflections and pose, also share Diane`s opinion regarding the "strong" darks and a small shift on the composition.

This post also raised a question in my mind that i think would be nice, could the color temperature of the advocet have been more close to the ambient light temperature maybe through flash filters?

[Diane Miller]

Flash filters would be a good idea. I sometimes shoot small birds on perches in open shade on my deck, with sunlight on trees in the distant BG. If I use a color balance that gives pleasing color to the trees, the birds are blue, and a warming gel on the flash neutralizes them. Of course it's not easy to get an exact color balance, as the light on the trees changes (it's usually before mid-morning, but not first light.)

It might not be so simple in the field, but I shoot a gray card in the same shade, illuminated by the flash and filling the frame, and set a custom WB in camera. I have 3 gray cards and all are surprisingly different "colors" of gray. Oddly enough, the most ancient one is the most neutral.

There isn't much time to fiddle with things like this in the field, but with a little experience and intuition, I think it could be interesting to have a couple of different strength warming filters and put on what feels like the closest one as the light changes. I haven't tried this outside of my deck, but it's an interesting idea and I'll experiment with it. You could get by without the gray card step and set WB in the RAW converter -- there is a lot of leeway there without degrading an image.

[Grant Yang]

Thanks for the suggestions. I like the idea of using gels on the flash to match the color temperature. I'm going to have to try it out next time I'm out there.