This is a bufflehead. Personally I have never seen it before until today. From afar, it looks like it's just black-and-white to me. The closest it got was about 30 ft from the trail by the pond. This was taken on a cloudy day. Really cloudy.
This is a bad shot, I know I know, so your critiques are appreciated but not really required this time :D:D
Question for you the experts: How do you decide your exposure so that you will have details in both the white feathers and the darker feathers on the head and the back?
Personally I would like to be able to take a reading off an incident light meter :)
On my monitor it looks like it has a blue color cast. But the Photoshop readings show both the white and black are balanced. Mid-gray is very, very close, to balanced, too.
Thank you for your time and playing along !!
Last edited by Desmond Chan; 11-17-2008 at 02:33 AM.
Hi Desmond - only two things I acn say would be soft light or Flash. Or expose the whites so that they are a little over (very carefully) thus giving more detail in the black and recover the whites via a linear burn / multiply layer, I know Doug Brown uses this techique to great success.
Personaly I think the Black/White birds are the toughest of all to expose for as you literally have the two extremes of the colour range to deal with.
This might be the toughest since you will not capture the colors without sun ..... and with sun you will block or toast !!!
I try going after the highlights since overdone they look worse than blocked shadows. A double conversion as Lance mentions is a good option. While making exposures I do try to bracket which is unusual for digital !!!
Desmond -- on my monitor it looks like you have done pretty well for an very dull overcast day. I'd like to look at your image in detail a bit later. Glenn Bartley has some excellent images of Bufflehead at his website http://www.glennbartley.com/
Via his images, you'll how complex and rich the head of the male Bufflehead actually.
Cheers
Gail
Desmond
I know... you only wanted experts, and here I am chatting on (smile). I think you've got the black and white spot on; push the midtones. In ACR I tried upping the clarity slider to 30+ and added a bit more saturation and vibrance. It's the purple and greens on the head that need to pop out.
From a very non-expert, cheers
Gail
Desmond,
A mighty fine capture. agree with Lance and Mr. Forns. My suggestion would be to boost saturation and contrast just a tad. You might want to check the swim angle; it looks like the duck is swimming up hill. looking forward to your next one...:cool:
Lance, in pp I did apply Linear Burn to enhance the details in white like you have suggested. Good thing is I didn't blown out the white when taking the shot.
Al, I think you're spot on about needing light for the colors but the light can easily screw up the white. I was once shooting swan under bright sunlight. By the time the white feathers looked ok, everything else looked dark :o I did use pp to enhance the details in the white feathers when I pp some other shots from the same series.
Gail and Gus, good suggestion on enhancing the colors of the head. But, it did look that dark when I was there seeing them with my naked eyes :o
Gus, the water in front of the bufflehead was being pushed by the bird. You know, the same thing you see in front of a boat when it's moving fast in the water? Have to say though I and the bird were not exactly parallel to each other where I took this shot.
How do you expose for this situation? - part 2
