Gannet In Flight

[Melissa Groo]

Canon 5d Mark II
EF 400mm f/5.6L USM
ISO 100
1/1000sec
handheld; no flash
f/6.7

I recently joined this site. Posted a couple pics to the Avian forum before realizing the Eager to Learn much better for my beginner status! Glad to be here.

All critiques very welcome. Photo taken a few weeks ago at Cape St Mary's, Newfoundland.

[Thanaboon Jearkjirm]

Love the full wing span of the bird, the hint of environment in the background and how you manage to get the wing tips clearly separate from the dark background. There are some blown white on the back of the bird, you might be able to recover those with RAW file. I might also try a vertical crop version and see how it look.

[Joel Eade]

I would agree with Thanaboon....looking at the histogram in CS4 the back of the bird and the proximal lower wing are clipped, so you needed more shutter speed or perhaps f/8.

The only other thing is the bird is lookng away and may have already flown past your best vantage point.

Joel

[John Chardine]

Hi Melissa- Great to have you here!

I like the layout of the image and the wing position. My initial reaction to the image was how good the exposure was considering the difficulty of capturing a white bird on a very dark background (BG). Some of the pixels on the back are indeed running at 100% luminance or very close to it. This is easily solved if you shot the image in RAW because you can use the Recovery slider in Photoshop or bring the exposure back a little, or both. The latter will make the BG even darker so you could slide the Fill light slider to the right a bit to bring out some detail. All this is done in Adobe Camera Raw before you bring it into Photoshop proper. Once into Photoshop you could use Image->Adjustments->Shadows/Highlights to bring out more detail in the BG, or a simple mid-tones adjustment in Levels or Curves. These adjustments will tend to bring out noise in the underexposed shadow areas but your decision to use 100 ISO will give you the lowest noise, and the 5D mkII is a clean camera to begin with.

For birds in flight in the future I would suggest using a higher ISO- say 400 or 800- and upping your shutter speed and f-stop. Both will have the effect of increasing your keeper rate. Also manual exposure mode is useful because you can expose for the subject and not worry that much about the tonality of the background.

[Joel Eade]

John explained much better than I did, very well witten. Here is the levels histogram from CS4 and I circled the area that shows the clipped highlights. When you open an image in ACR you can hold down the Alt key and when you move the exposure slider you will be able to see any clipped areas (same the blacks slider and the recovery slider).

When shooting check the histogram at least occasionally to be sure you're not getting the highlights too far to the right.

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks so much, Joel. That's really helpful, I will use that levels histogram in the future!

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks John. I really appreciate your help with the RAW process, something I am really just learning. I am embarrassed to say that somehow I forgot to change over my jpegs to RAW before I got to Cape St Mary's (was going back and forth to save space on my CF cards). So they are not in RAW. Heartbreaking. I've chalked it up to a lesson learned. I may post another pic or two from that day, as I have some other gannet ones that seem decent enough (not BIF).
I think using the higher ISO is really instructive for me too, whenever I do BIF, which I am keen to improve on, having recently bought the 400mm f/5.6L USM lens. And I need to move out of my comfort zone of always working in AV, and try Manual Mode, and up my shutter speed. Opening up to 5.6 would have been a wiser choice here too, as you say.
Thanks again.

[Melissa Groo]

Thank you Thanaboon!

[Lance Peters]

Big warm welcome Mellisa - dont hesitate to jump right in and leave comments on other peoples images - no better or faster way to improve your own skills.
All we ask is that you say what it is you like or dont like about the image.

Love Ganetts - nice first post.
John has the main points covered above and Joel has covered the rest.
Make sure to turn your over exposure warnings in the camera on and make use of your LCD to check your exposure. Manual mode is very useful when the BG is changing - you set the exposure for your subject and it stays at that regardless of the BG - In any of the auto modes the BG will influence the exposure.

Keep em coming :)

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks John (reposting this, wanted to make sure you saw it as I realized I may not have responded directly to your post earlier when I submitted response--still figuring out how to use this forum! (-:). I really appreciate your help with the RAW process, something I am really just learning. I am embarrassed to say that somehow I forgot to change over my jpegs to RAW before I got to Cape St Mary's (was going back and forth to save space on my CF cards). So they are not in RAW. Heartbreaking. I've chalked it up to a lesson learned. I may post another pic or two from that day, as I have some other gannet ones that seem decent enough (not BIF).
I think using the higher ISO is really instructive for me too, whenever I do BIF, which I am keen to improve on, having recently bought the 400mm f/5.6L USM lens. And I need to move out of my comfort zone of always working in AV, and try Manual Mode, and up my shutter speed. Opening up to 5.6 would have been a wiser choice here too, as you say.
Thanks again.

[Melissa Groo]

First off, thanks for your warm welcome!

Big warm welcome Mellisa - dont hesitate to jump right in and leave comments on other peoples images - no better or faster way to improve your own skills.
All we ask is that you say what it is you like or dont like about the image.
Will do so Lance, once I get to a point where I feel I have knowledge to share!

Love Ganetts - nice first post.
John has the main points covered above and Joel has covered the rest.
Make sure to turn your over exposure warnings in the camera on and make use of your LCD to check your exposure. Manual mode is very useful when the BG is changing - you set the exposure for your subject and it stays at that regardless of the BG - In any of the auto modes the BG will influence the exposure.
Thanks for this, will do so!

Keep em coming :)
Will post another today!