This Goose is always hanging around the rowing club along the Yarra river downtown Melbourne. She likes to make quite the racket and will come eat right out of your hands if you have oats or bread.
Canon 60D + 70-200mm @ 200, ISO 500, F4.0, 1/1600th, all adjustments done in LR5. I had taken this a hour before sunset from the prone position and would have preferred to have the sun behind my back instead of to my side which resulted in a bit of the neck being a little blown out.
The lighting is interesting because it gives a newer perspective despite the blown whites. I wish the head were turned to the camera just a bit. Background blur good.
Nice regal pose! I can't ID the goose but a couple of thoughts: If a subject will sit still I try to have a quick look at the LCD screen for blinkies and adjust exposure and shoot again if I have a highlight problem. A sunlit white area against a dark BG is a red flag, if you are using Av or Tv. The camera will try to increase exposure so the BG isn't too dark and blow out highlights. (There will be some protection of highlights in the exposure calculation, but often not enough.) Did you do all you can with the Highlights and Shadows sliders, combined with Exposure? You can often recover a lot of highlight detail. In a high contrast situation like this I'd bring Highlights all the way left and Shadows all teh way right, then see where the most balanced Exposure setting was. Maybe add some Clarity of it looks too flat, and bring Blacks down if the darkest areas go too gray. The sliders may not need the rull range, but it's a place to start to see what you can do.
Nik's Detail Extractor can often recover a little more shadow and highlight detail.
Is there any more of the image on the bottom? I feel I'd like to see a little more there and a little less space on top.
I'm pretty sure its a grey leg but am not a hundred precent sure, I am unfamiliar with Australian geese at the moment but I know with Canadian geese there are 5 or 6 different sub species that all look the same unless you a expert ( which I am not )
I believe I have done all I can to recover the whites in LR5, I don't have Nik's Detail Extractor but I will look in to it. I can't remember if it was you Diane that recommended in someone else thread michael Frye's Landscapes in LR5 but I have been studying his PDF file and have used what I have learned about the Whites, Blacks, Shadows, Highlights. I will go back and try your suggestion though as it is a little different that what my approach was.
This was a uncropped photo so there isn't anymore picture to be had.
I took your suggestion about the 150-600 Tamron and was lucky enough to track one down today ( I was told from many places I would have to wait till the end of May) and just walked in the door with it a hour ago. I set it up on the tripod and have taken a serious of shots and I gotta say it looks very promising to be a very good lens for the price. It will also be easier to travel with then a big Canon Prime as I'm in Australia at the moment and will be traveling for the next year and a half. Its been a really rainy and overcast day but I am gonna head out and see what this thing can do.
Congrats on the lens! Keep us posted on your impressions!
There is indeed a limit to highlight recovery. Given the obvious bright lighting, I think you did an excellent job. For my tastes, the face has great highlight detail and the brightness on the neck is not a big problem.
I think Frye's e-book as a great $15 investment for anyone who doesn't know LR well.
Nik's Detail Extractor is in Color Efex, along with a lot of other useful and fun stuff.
Leigh-Can't comment re: Species. Diane's suggestion re: highlight alerts (blinkies) is a good one, though I've found both the 60D and 7D's do tend to give false warnings, which can be a source for under-exposure- something you want to avoid if possible with either of these cameras. With practice you will be better able to evaluate what the screen is telling you and adjust accordingly. Congratulations on your new lens!!
If I felt the camera was showing me more blowout than I found I could deal with in raw conversion, I'd set contrast and maybe sharpness lower. Remember, what you see on the LCD screen is an on-the-fly JPEG based on those settings and is not necessarily a good approximation of what you can do in a raw converter.
Greyleg Goose ( I think )
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