Sure do love photo trips to California. Met up with Jim Salywoda and a couple of his friends the other day and had a great time. I love the perch and pose I got from this Ring-Billed Gull. It looks like he's doing martial arts. I've really been trying to expose to the right, and I like my results. The Mark III has between 1/3 and 1 extra stop of white information when the histogram is showing over exposure. This gull was photographed in sunlight at +1. The whites were blown on the histogram but were easily recoverable in Lightroom.
Canon 1D Mark III, 600mm, f/8, 1/1600, ISO 640, +1 EC, no flash, tripod
Great shot Doug, being a fan of Taekwondo I can appreciate the technique. Looks kind of like an assisted sidekick/ridge-wing to me. Nice pose and details. Thanks for the smile.
Great shot Doug. I was under the impression that if you blew out the highlights they were never recoverable. I assume it is the camera quality that allows you to recover and not Lightroom?
PMP. Pretty much perfect. Wonderful wing stretch and framing. Joanna, the flashing highlight alert in many cameras is on the sensitive side, so if you have some flashing pixels it is usually child's play to save the highlihgts during conversion. What method you use depends on what program you are using to convert.
Doug, the whites are bright; this is a perfect candidate for a Linear Burn. (See the post in ER.)
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Good question Joanna! Artie's explanation is good. It turns out that when you shoot RAW there is more room on the right side of the histogram than meets the eye. Even when you are shooting in RAW, the histogram that view on your camera's LCD is of a JPEG conversion. RAW files can record many more brightness levels on the right side of the histogram than can JPEG files. A 14-bit RAW file can record about 16,000 brightness levels per pixel. Half of those brightness levels (about 8,000) are assigned to the brightest stop of your exposure (the far right portion of the histogram). In a JPEG there are only a total of 256 brightness levels per pixel. Of that number, only 69 brightness levels are assigned to the far right of the histogram. For this reason, areas that look blown on your histogram often have considerable detail when you do your RAW processing.
You can try this yourself, and it's actually a good idea to have an idea of how far you can push an exposure to the right. Put your camera on a tripod. Find a stationary subject with a fair amount of white in it. Take an exposure at the suggested settings. Then take a series of photos where you dial in increasing amounts of + EC up to +1 or +2. Make note of your histogram with each exposure, paying attention to the point at which you start getting the blinkies. Go into your RAW processor and try to recover the 'blown' areas in each of your exposures. You'll probably find that you have close to one stop of detail hidden in a seemingly blown photo.
I agree Raymond. They look white but not blown. Of course I'm working off of my laptop right now. When I get back home this weekend I'll check things out on a big calibrated monitor.
Another thing to remember is that the histogram is a composit of all three color channels, and you might not have blown the highlights in all of the colors. The detail information may still be available in one or two other colors.
Nice image Doug! I am surprised Robert is the first one to bring up the 3 channels. I always check the histogram per channel. Are you saying here Doug that on your original file all channels show blown highlights???
Kung Fu Gull
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