Macro Swift

[shane shacaluga]

Walking in the countryside with my dogs and macro setup, i encountered a large group of swift feeding on flying ants

Set the SS to 1/1600, f4.5 and auto iso (280 on this one). Just snapped away until i got a few decent images

Nikon D7000, nikon 105mm vr micro lens, quite a substantial crop.

Sharpened and NR on Lightroom and increased the blue saturation a bit to give the sky a nicer tone

Image url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/5303787...n/photostream/

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Shane,

I like this shot a bird that is rarely photographed due to its fast flight and agile movement. The opportunity here is both sharpness and composition. The sharpness is a challenging thing for this species especially in full flight. The lens used might not be the best for flight photography as well and a faster shutter might help have helped, on balance pretty good with a macro setup. The composition could be improved by taking some of the negative space from the right and moving the subject towards the corner - either one.

A clean well lit eye usually makes an image more compelling notice the left eye blends with the wing. Finally, were you shooting in Manual Mode - the image might be a bit underexposed due to the bight light source behind the subject. Often we will add a 1.5 stops of light to stop the meter from underexposing. I like what you are doing and BIF are challenging keep em coming.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks for the comments Jeff. Yes was in manual mode with auto ISO

Have a couple of more keepers from this session. One where only one eye is visible but that is from the bottom up. Not sure which one I prefer.

Wouldnt adding more light stops on this one have caused the white under the chin to be blown out?

Again thanks

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Shane, good comments by Jeff. Your question is valid, and the answer is that there is no good exposure solution for mixed light. You have bright highlights and dark shadows in the same scene and the camera cannot expose properly for both. When exposing for the whites in this situation (as you should in any situation), the blacks will get crushed.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Shane,The meter is compensating for the bright background light remember it wants everything to be a mid-tone gray. Thus by adding more light you counter the meter reducing light this applies when you are shooting towards a bright light source like a sunny sky or window. As a general rule we add more light when shooting towards the sky, was your histogram clipped on the left?