Landing Stilt

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L
1/1000 sec f/5.6 ISO 320

Levels and sharpening in CS5

[Kerry Perkins]

Ian, this is a lovely capture with nice detail and color. The water looks great and the landing pose is excellent. However, the whites are over. It's that 1/3 stop that I keep talking about. I typically shoot these birds at ISO 400, f/5.6 at 1/1600. Excellent job on the action capture.

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, Kerry. Frankly I was worried that if I increased my SS to save my whites, I would underexpose the blacks. You're right again, though

[Karen Forderer]

Great capture. What long legs! I like the detail and the motion blur. I would love to see one of these birds.

Karen

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Great capture and timing. The overexposure is a bit of a distraction, but its not easy to get a BW bird in harsh(ish) light. I think that the blurred wingtip detracts a bit from the image, but not much.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

I think the problem arises from taking images of a black and white bird in high contrast (harsh) light, which makes proper exposure of both dark and light plummage very unlikely. The whites may have been over with this image, but I don't find this nearly as much a problem as the black plummage, which lacks any detail and the blurred left wing is pretty much a mess (in my opinion of course). As noted, decreasing exposure to get the whites right, which look just fine to me as is, would just make the appearance of the dark plummage even worse.
I may give up too easily and I wouldn't have even attempted the shot, and gone after stilt images, which I do quite often, when the lighting was lower contrast which means some cloud cover or overcast conditiions, or perhaps early or late in the day. If I didn't have a choice, I would have gone for the exposure of the dark plummage, blown the whites, and tried recovery or other methods to get some detail out of the white plummage in post-processing. regards~Bill