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Ring Neck Pheasant ~ High Key
Before I describe this shot I'll answer the question....NO, I didn't remove the background in CS3 :)
Last year on Easter Morning, I was driving through NH before sunrise to find someplace open to buy a coffee.
I went past a field when it was just barely light enough to see and saw a pheasant in the distance. It was cold, I had no coat, hat or gloves and typically pheasant flee the minute they see me, so I smiled inside that I had seen it and drive on.
Fifteen minutes later on my way back to my inlaws, I get to the field and the bird is still there, although a bit closer. The car thermometer reads 19 degrees, there's two feet of snow and like any good nature photographer, I stop, pull out the tripod with the D2Xs and 500 mounted and slowly work my way toward the bird...no hat, no coat and no gloves. I am instantly frozen and feeling stupid.
Miraculously, I approach as low as I can without getting down into the snow and the bird remains calm. The sun hasn't yet crested the mountains to the east and the sky is a beautiful twilight sort of bluish color. The closer I get to this beauty, the less I acknowledge the cold.
As the bird was back lit and I hadn't brought the flash, I had to really overexpose the overall scene in order to light the bird on it's shadow side somewhat properly. I obtained three images before this beautiful male retreated into the brush, with this particular one bing my favorite. If you look closely, you can make out the blue shadows cast by his underside with the light of pre dawn coming from the opposite direction.
Nikon D2Xs, 500 AFSII, f 6.3 , 1/60, ISO 640, matrix metering with +2.3 EV compensation