Grackle

[Russell Martin]

Howdy folks!

Grackle here, taken in the early part of the evening.
40D, 70-300mm
300mm
f/10
1/320
+0.33
ISO 400
Spot metering
Shot in RAW

PP cropped, prolly sorry attempt at sharpening the Grackle, lightened the background colors

C/C welcome and appreciated!

[Lance Peters]

Hi - Couple of things come to mind with the techs - F10 is probably a bit of overkill here - typically you will want to blur the busy background out - which would mean opening up F5.6 or so. This would have also increased your shutter speed a little which may have been good - as it does look just a tad soft.

On my screen does look like a lot of the blacks are blocked (No Detail) - soft light will help bring out the sheen in the feathers on these guys.

Not sure on your use of spot metering?? Why were you using spot and what did you meter of??

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Given the dark subject color and light BG, I would think spot might be an option here - IMO. Eval would tend to merge everything together and possibly compromise both blacks and highlights. Agree with Lance, it would depend on your metering reference point. Everything else covered - thanks for sharing.

[Alfred Forns]

Great points and agree !!! Regarding the metering would stay away from spot, you can get an excellent image faster with other methods. Would stay in the segment type metering.

.... if I was sure the spot would rest only on the color that I choose, that the bird will stay there long enough and I would get the reading and transfer to the camera .... then would be ok !!!

Exposure wise your histogram will be your greatest tool, make sure there is data on the last box to the right and you will be fine most of the time. For this one we would like seeing some detail in the dark feathers, with proper light the entire bird lights up with that beautiful bluish color .. not easy to do !!!

... there are a couple of other things that will leave out see if someone else can come in and comment !!!

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Al, good points as usual. Just like having options in extreme cases where darks and lights are so far apart - but you have forgot more photography than I will ever know.

Maybe +1.66/2.0 EV to stop BG from underexposing image, key is to check histogram - blinkies!!

[Harold Davis]

two things stick out to me. you say you had to lighten the bg. if that's the case, you were underexposed. in order to expose a dark bird, the bg is going to be automatically lighter. so you should have been ~+1.0EV. the second thing that comes to mind is the use of flash. may have helped out here considering the head and top of the chest hold detail and the bottom of the bird does not. you have two different light intensities and the flash fill would have helped.

[Russell Martin]

Thank you for the comments and critiques.

The grackle was about 12 feet up in a tree and I was shooting at some ground birds before I noticed him. No really good way to reduce the angle or distance.

How much flash (I use Canon obviously) would I need?

Doc