This is still my project family as I am learning quite a bit about how to present these birds properly and with your help I will get there and stop boring you with one species and vary my birds much more.
This also captured with the 5D MKII, 400mm f/5.6 L at f/7.1, 1/1250 sec., ISO-400, Pattern metering, 0 step, AP.
There are some noticeable hot whites on the head, chest and wing, for this light situation fill fash would be of great help IMO. Nice bird's atitude and species. If you shoot this as RAW you could try to recover those whites.
Congratulations.
Hi Christopher - Love these guys - #1 problem here is the blown whites on the head and breast area. Some of these may be too far gone to recover in PP - exposure is something that you should be striving to get right or at least very close in camera.
Black and white birds are best in soft light - you will struggle with these guys in anything but soft light. (Angle of light is also important)
Like the open beak pose - some NR on the BG will help also.
Thanks Ramon I am reading up on that subject now and also coming to grips with 21 Megapixels Raw which I have to convert to DNGs to use in CS3 (I only shoot in RAW)
Would you suggest I just use my 580 EXII or a better beemer as fill in flash.
What is te best vehicle? not blow the whites in the first place (how) or recover them in PP?
most of the crits have been covered - like the pose but the head has lost a lot of detail, probably due to noise reduction? do you use the noise reduction tool in your RAW converter software? should rather not as they rob you of detail - best is to select the BG in PS and do NR only on that.
I'm sure you'll get the perfect shot soon - I have also found these guys look the best in soft light.
Great looking bird, a very worthy subject to learn on.
In response to your questions above, it is always better to get it right in the camera. RAW allows some recovery of mistakes, but even if you can get the histogram back into the normal range, there often is loss of detail, increase in noise, etc. depending on what you have to do. So, check your histogram all the time. Its ironic, that to get the most information in the file, you need to expose the image to get as far to the right on the histogram, without going out of bounds (over exposing.)
The reason a better beamer helps in this situation is that it fills in the shadowed areas and effectively reduces the dynamic range of the subject, the range between the blackest black and whitest white. Cameras, even very good ones, have much less dynamic range than our eyes, so you always have to try to 'see like the image sensor', not like how our eyes work.
I might suggest you set up a test dummy, that is stationary, and methodically try different exposures, watch your histogram, learn to push it to the right as you vary exposure, watch for clipping of highlights. Try flash to fill in shadows, etc. You will quickly learn the ropes, without worrying about it flying away, wrong head angle, etc.
A panda stuffed animal would work well, because it has blacks and whites, and some form so shadows can be seen.
Sounds silly, but you can learn a lot in a controlled setup like this.
Hi Christopher, Lance and Ramon pretty well covered the points. Have a look in ER: (educational Resources), as Artie has something on ACR workflow that applies here and may be of use). Nice pose BTW
I decided to use these folks as they are a Black/White subject and from my film/and Black and White days they were the most challenging and the same seems to be the case with digital.
All your advice will in time lead to great captures and I can't thank you all enough.
My time with you all is limited but I intend to make the best of it, and hopefully pass you all on to my two boys 22/25 who are now learning that this is indeed a great and rewarding challenge.
They will both be in Florida soon with my family and I hope they will see some of your wonderful sites and come back to Aussie with love of this great pursuit.
A difficult subject - I'm still struggling with whites myself and will also make use of the comments. I like Randy's suggestion of using a stationary model to play with flash settings, I've become fairly comfortable with flash for shorter distances and am trying to master the better beamer. Thanks Randy for a great tip!!
Main problem is the overexposed whites and yes, I totally agree with Randy, it is much better and rewarding to gete the right exposure in camera. Of course, RAW is a great way to fix minor deviation from the right exposure. RAW files also allows very dramatic recoveries of files under or overexposed but, like Randy said, you are going to pay a high price in form of loss of details and noise increase.
The shooting angle is not the best, a bit steped to my taste, and the head turn could be better but the opened beak is a big bonus.
BTW, we are not boring with the images of these beautiful kites ;-)
"Another" Black Shouldered Kite
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
