Black Guan

[Ilija Dukovski]

Taken on 4/20/09, Monteverde, Costa Rica.

Nikon D80
Nikkor 300mm AF-S
Tripod
f/4.0 1/20 ISO400
Metering Mode Pattern -0.67

Deep in forested foggy area (Cloud Forest), light very uneven and patchy.
Critique and comments truly appreciated.

[Tony Whitehead]

Interesting looking bird, Ilija. The blue skin and warm iris contrast well. This is a difficult exposure sitution. The image looks under-exposed to me with little detail in the darks. Minus exposure compensation for a dark subject can be useful to prevent rendering it too light but in this case the meter has seen the bright BG and so underexposed the bird too much with the -0.67. A shadow/highlight adjustment or adjusting the midpoint slider in levels or lifting the curve can bring some detail back into the dark tones but with more noise than would have been there with a bit more exposure at capture. There also seems to be a bit bit of a green cast from that leaf filtered light.

[Stu Bowie]

Lovely inquisitive pose. I feel your ss has let you down here, and may I ask why a neg exp comp.

[Ilija Dukovski]

Thank you for the critique, it is really helpful to find out what others think
about this difficult situation.

The negative exp comp is for the simple reason that the previous shot w/o it
completely burned the beak area. This way I got only a small patch of overexposed
area on the top of the beak which I recovered in Camera Raw.

I tried adjusting the shadows, but did not like the result. Yes I've got detail on the
black but it seemed too unrealistic and gray. In reality what you see of this bird is a big, completely
black, body with a strong patch of blue on the head. I wanted to preserve that feel.