scarlet ibis and chick at zoo

[Jeroen Wijnands]

I am not exactly pleased with this shot and am looking for ways to improve. Shot at a solid grey overcast day in an old fashioned bird house in a zoom. Trough mesh and with mesh in the background.

I was looking to capture the feeding, like the look of that long bill going all the way into it's parent's bill.

I am unsure if I got the colours right and what, if anything I could have done not to get that restless looking background.

Camera Nikon D300
Exposure 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 250 mm
ISO Speed 1000


http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1262/5123549241_0164759894_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/j_wijnands/5123549241/)
Ibis feeding a chick (http://www.flickr.com/photos/j_wijnands/5123549241/) by j_wijnands (http://www.flickr.com/people/j_wijnands/), on Flickr

[Geoff Warnock]

mesh and busy backgrounds are terrible at zoos. we have the same problem round here.

In this case I would either keep the shot as is as a memento of the behaviour, or try replacing the entire background to bring the focus onto the birds.

The colours seem a little flat to me, so I think you could raise the saturation a little. The white on the wing leftmost in your image also looks too bright, if you captured in raw maybe you can save it.

[Julie Kenward]

Yes, zoos are not always the best place to try to create outstanding images...there is always a lot going on in the BG. I think you chose a good aperture - f5.6 will give you the depth you need while keeping the BG from being too infocus - but because of all that is going on here it couldn't possibly rule out all distrations.

My advice to you in a situation like this is go in as tight as you possibly can for each image. If this were the scene I had been presented with I would have tried to get the two heads and part of the shoulders on each bird and let everything else fall away. That would have eliminated 95% of your BG woes and yet capitalized on the feeding behavior that you wanted to illuminate. I also would have tried to position myself more head on so you could see both their eyes better and get even more facial expression.

Hope that helps...

As for the whites on the mama bird...I don't see any clipping on the histogram so my guess is it has lost detail because your shutter speed was too slow to capture all the movement.

[Jeroen Wijnands]

Thanks Julie.

Unfortunately a better stand point was out of the question here, quite a lot of obstructions except for this spot.
I am skilled enough to be concious about blown highlights and know how to avoid them most of the time.

I will try to get closer next time. Up until now I've always been trying to get some context in my bird shots, something that doesn't work well in zoos, thanks for putting the finger on my weak spot there.