This image was taken while I was trying to take some BIF of other species. These stilts landed close to me and created this nice composition for me. Thanks for looking.
Lovely symmetry of the poses, Lorant. The light angle is a bit unkind and there are some blown whites. There seem to be some odd textures in the BG - did you do some cloning/patching in there to remove debris on the water?
Thanks for the comments Tony and Axel. I haven't touched the BG, it is what it was. There are blown whites and I tried to tone them down a bit......it is not easy to get the exposure right with this b&w birds. Here is a vertical crop and I sharpened it a little more....let me know if it is better or not.
The repost does look better. I agree, B/W birds can be hard to expose right. EC +1 was too much here, you could have gone to to -0.33 or so and the light angle didn't help you, either. I think the image needs about 1 degree CW rotation.
Indeed black and white birds are difficult to get the exposure compensation right. Black something like +1, white -1. Its a wash and then should be zero. However, there are other considerations. Which is easier to bring details out of when post-processed, assuming white will be somewhat overexposed, and black somewhat underexposed. One other consideration: lightening underexposed dark colors creates noise, and it is probably better to err on the side of overexposure.
Solution: Go manual, forget about exposure compensation. Take test shots, using an educated guess to get you in the ballpark to start. Look at your histogram. Adjust, either aperture or shutterspeed, toward overexposure, Take more test shots, each time examine the histogram and adjust and stop when the blinkies show up on the right side of the histogram. Back it off a bit. Delete your test shots. You should be able to do this operation in less than a minute, with a little practice much faster. You've eliminated having to guess on exposure compensation values. Your images may very well look terribly overexposed on your LCD, but as long as you don't blow out the whites(no blinkies), you'll be OK. You will be amazed at the details actually present when you lower the exposure to normal while post-processing. regards~Bill
Oh, one more thing, and probably why you need sharpening. F4 is probably an insufficient depth of field to get both birds in sharp focus, probably need to go to F5.6, at a minimum.
Last edited by WIlliam Maroldo; 06-04-2009 at 11:13 PM.
Honeymoon #2-Stilts
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