Arctic Tern With Tidbit

[Bill Dix]

Another tern flight shot from Iceland. Full frame except that I cropped some from left and added equal amount on right for comp.

D7200, 500f4 + 1.4 TC, ISO 800, 1/3200s @ f/8 manual.

[David Salem]

Man I love that sky color and the wing position is awesome showing the beautiful feathers and details.
I shoot thousands of frames of Terns a year and this is an issue that I see if you expose only thinking about the whites. You wind up with nice whites, but a little grayish, and blacks are somewhat solid and blocked. It becomes hard to separate the eye from the black cap and it takes away from the overall frame IMO.
I like to have 15-20% of the whites blinking on my highlight alert, which aren't fried against what you might think. It's an alert and normally you can get all of the detail back using the highlight slider or the brush tool set to reduce the brightest highlights.
You should then wind up with the darks being exposed much better, reveling the all important eye, and the whites are whiter and cleaner. Might be contrary to someone else's thinking but just giving you some food for thought and what has worked for me over the years. The light angle has caused this darker head too. Nice capture.

[gail bisson]

I love the wing position!Nice to see the food in the bill.
The blacks are a bit blocked making the eye a bit hard to see.
I agree 100% with Dave's advice. I usually have a few blinkies on the whites but usually try for ~5% blinkies. I am not as brave as David!
Gail

[Doug Brown]

Great advice from Dave. Your whites are somewhat gray, and your blacks are lacking in detail. Don't be afraid to push your exposure to the right when photographing white and black birds; it makes all the difference in the world.

[Bill Dix]

Thank you all. I generally do try (at least in principle) to expose for a few blinkies. The TIFF file of the OP showed 238 as the brightest whites, and 28 or so for the head, which I thought sounded pretty good. But as you've pointed out, the whites did look a little grey, and there is no detail in the blacks. I'm guessing I was a little too aggressive in trying to tone down the highlights to bring out more detail. Here's a repost. Let me know what you think.

[David Salem]

Hi Bill,

Not to try to shoot you down but the blacks look worse. They are now unnaturally light and so is the eye. It almost has that steel eye look. The whites look a bit better. This is a perfect example of the advice I see people getting about "expose only for the whites and then bring back the blacks in PP". It doesn't always work really well in my experience. I use my theory of exposing for the different percentages of darks to lights. This tern might have 10% of its body and head being black. Hence, then maybe try to expose for that 10% of black also. The key is to know how your specific highlight alert works compared to getting salvageable whites. Take a bunch of practice shots trying to get more and more exposure on a subject and then go home and see how bad the whites are, even when as much as 50% of the bird is blinking. You might be surprised that the whites aren't as bad as it looked on the alert. Then all you have to do is reduce the exposure in the brightest spots and the rest looks awesome.
Hope this helps

[Bill Dix]

Thanks for taking the time, David. I did lighten the head and probably went too far, especially on the eye. No one has mentioned the lighting, but this was shot at around 11:00 am on a rather sunny day. I'm wondering how realistic it is to get perfect exposure on blacks and whites under those conditions.