This is a portrait of our local juvenile peregrine falcon. This thing is fast in the air and it's a good workout on my BIF techniques. It also makes me realize how limiting the AF can be when f/6.3 is all I have. Anyway, let's not cry over tools that I do not possess, here is one shot while it is perching. I am a little wary shooting at ISO 2000, but I need the shutter speed; so what the heck, it's better than not having any shot of this little cutie.
Tech: 460mm, f/6.3, ISO-2000; 1/1000 sec; I was on manual mode and Matrix metering +0.3 EV dialed in camera. I think when I shot this it was probably about -0.3 on the camera light meter which probably ends up bringing this to a nett amount of 0EV. I wish I had ETTR this a bit more. I ended up still bringing the exposure slider -0.4 and compensate everything else on the other sliders. Highlight only probably half way down to burn the OOF background a bit and then bring up the shadows to almost maximum. White and black sliders to compensate for contrast a bit. This was shot at sunset so it was naturally very warm; but the side of the bird that faced the cliff was very blue with greenish tint on it so I had to brush in a little bit temperature and tint compensation for the left half of the body and a little bit on the beak and face facing us. The crop was done from top and bottom to better fit the bird. Other than that pretty much as is.
Noise reduction was done using Nik Dfine while masking out the bird (using the control point on Dfine) and finally sharpened using Nik for presentation (pretty much just on the bird).
Attachment 162774
