Male Painted Bunting

[Bob Blanchard]

Captured this morning at Corkscew Swamp. Always a challenging setup, as there is no natural light to speak of over by the area where the Painted Buntings are. Spent most of the time in manual mode, but this one happened to be in AV. Very hard to get a nice clean BG there. Still getting used to the 50D, and today was my first day using flash on it.

Canon 50D, 600mm f/4L, ISO 200, f/4, 1/160, -1EV, 580 EX Flash with Better Beamer at -1 1/3, tripod.

[Stephen Stephen]

Bob nice pose on this bird and good head turn. I'd love to see this beautiful species some day

I know what you mean about poor light conditions. Did you create any images with less intense fill flash, say -1 2/3 to -2?

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great pose, eye contact and details, beautiful specimen, too. The bird looks a bit overflashed on my monitor.

[Arthur Morris]

If the subject looks over-flashed, a simple reverse S-Curves adjustment can often help:

[Rich Williams]

Beautiful color and sharpness. Flash exposure on my monitor looks good on your version of the photo. I would probably do a little selective blur on the background.

[Bob Blanchard]

Stephen - I did capture plenty at -1 2/3. None at - 2, though. Many of the all-manual ones came out great (from an exposure perspective), but I prefer this pose to any of the others I got.

Artie - Thanks for the curves tip on flash "tuning"!

I'm not a big fan of full-blown flash photography for wildlife yet. It may be because I have yet to master the technique, but I usually avoid circumstances like the Painted Buntings at corkscrew where I'm forced to use flash as the predominant light source. I'm trying to work through that, and hopefully it will be conquered like everything else I lay seige to ;-) I'll keep practicing!