Red Tailed Hawk Landing

[Loi Nguyen]

I'm struggling a bit learning how to expose manually, so appreciate your comments. I took a few test shots and look at the histogram and try to put data in the right hand most box. Often I have the highlight blown, so this time I reduced the exposure. This image may be 1/3 EV under-exposed, so I increased exposure by 1/3 EV in LR4. Increased the Shadow level a little bit, increased contrast, applied NR and sharpening all in LR4. Removed some distracting branches on the perch.

1DX
500f4 II + 2X III
f8
ISO-800
Manual exposure
Cropped to 20% of width and 20% of height

Thank you

Loi

[Jeannean Ryman]

Love the pose and intense stare you captured Loi! Nice detail as well. I wonder how this would look as a vertical crop? Nice photo!

[Kerry Perkins]

Loi, I'm curious as to why you thought the image was under-exposed. What led you to that conclusion? Your camera exposure was probably fine (what was the shutter speed?), but adding the 1/3 EV put the red channel into clipping. For the image as presented, I would take that 1/3 back and even another 1/3. You need to always, always, protect the whites. If you need some guidance in checking your images for overexposure, take a look at my sticky at the top of this forum home page - "Are the whites hot?". Remember that every channel of color, red - green - blue, needs to be controlled. As a general rule, you don't want your peak whites to be over the 240-245 mark. As you can see in my repost here, your red channel is clipped at 255 in the hottest parts of the peaks.