Another Oak Titmouse landed higher on the perch, out of the frame, and was menacing this one. It was luck I got the wingspread. No idea who won.
Canon 5D Mk III, 300mm f/2.8 IS + 1.4X III. Big Gitzo with Wimberley II. ISO 250, f/16, 1/200 sec, full sun with fill flash. Basic LR adjustments then to PS CS 6 for very minor cloning on left end of perch and Viveza to burn down the perch ends and some Structure on the bird's head and chest. Hard to believe I stopped most of the wing motion -- must have been a split second that they were held out in a this posture.
Hi Diane,
I like the pose and the diagonal line of the perch. Open beak is a plus as well. The eye looks clear and sharp. I would try to pull some more color out of the lichens on the branch.
Image is a bit bright and I would reduce the brightness a bit.
I find your settings interesting. Why F 16? F 8 would have let you double your SS.
Gail
I also wondered about the aperture.
A mistake or typo?
Other than Hummer multi flash setups, I cannot think of a reason to use f16 for bird photography.
If the SS went above 1/200 the flash wouldn't sync. Flash as fill gives much more balanced light in bright sun, and flash as main light (2-3 units, one for fill) gives the best light for birds in the shade, with an effective SS of 1/10,000 and up.
With the magnification on these small birds (this is almost FF), f/8 doesn't get nearly enough in focus. Magnification is a huge part of the rather complex DOF equation. A BIF at some distance will generally have much more DOF, due to less magnification, and a smaller format sensor will give more DOF than a full frame sensor at the same aperture.
Good comments from Gail and Dan. I will go to small f/stops if I have a group of birds and am trying to get as many in focus as possible, but not for single birds usually. The slow shutter speed was more likely to cause you grief than DOF.
I do agree about the brightness, needs to be toned down a bit. Suspect a luminosity mask with a bit of multiply blend mode might do the trick nicely.
Good choice on the flash to help tame the bright light and potential for dark shadows.
Cheers
Randy
Last edited by Randy Stout; 07-08-2013 at 06:26 PM.
Diane, if you are doing a lot of flash fill, you might want to look at using an external flash.
I use the SB600, not expensive, and it works as flash fill at any SS.
Only the in camera flash has to sync at the slow SS.
Even my in camera flash will sync at 1/320.
The Canon 5D Mk III does not have a built-in flash. Its sync speed with external flashes is 1/200 sec, whether they are mounted in the shoe or fired remotely. I use Canon 550 and 580 II units. For the bird setup they are fired off-camera by a MicroSync transmitter and receivers, and used in M mode. Probably should have put that in the description.
They can be set to "high speed sync" but that works by firing a longer burst of low intensity, so that some of it occurs during the time the shutter is open. It reduces the power of the flash proportional to the shutter speed, and will record blur for a subject in fast motion.
Using the flashes in M mode also prevents the exposure-calculating pre-flash that occurs in E-TTL mode, which spooks the birds so they are in the middle of a jump by the time the main flash fires.
Nikon may have a different system -- I don't know.
Randy, the reduced exposure in your repost is an improvement. I will go back to the RAW file and reduce exposure there. I like to fix things as far back in the chain as possible. The PS processing here is easy to redo on a better starting file.
Nice capture Diane. I like the pose and the head angle.. detailed looks very nice also. I like the repost by randy toning down the brightness a bit. Overall a very pleasing image.
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