Lincoln's Sparrow

[Dave Blinder]

Again, I'm intentionally posting a photo that was difficult to expose, produce, and process.

Main problem here was that bird was just about sidelit with bright sunshine, and I only had my bare 580ex to work with at the time. The original raw looks undersaturated, lacked contrast, and had a lot of shaded branches that I cloned out.

I'm still not sure if I love or hate this shot myself. Any and all comments welcome!




Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.013 sec (1/80)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 700 mm
ISO Speed: 320
Exposure Bias: +1/3 EV
Flash: On, Fired
Exposure Program: Aperture-priority AE

*forgot to add that I already burned as many highlights as I felt the photo could take

[Arthur Morris]

You have overcome most of the exposure problems except for the over-exposed sunlit portions of the perch.... The face looks as if if has been lightened considerably. What flash settings did you use? I like the pose and the head angle. A crop from the left would be in order. I do not like the large black frame.

[Dave Blinder]

Thanks for the comments!

Believe it or not, I haven't done much lightening in post-processing here, just a very very minor levels adjustment to try to right the image. 580ex was set to high speed synch (maybe wrongly), and I cranked up the power a bit. I find that when I'm nearing minimum focusing distance with the 500 f/4 + tc, even the bare flash can lift a shadow or 2.

I've actually burned the perch highlights a decent amount, it took the brunt of the harsh light. Black border is just because I host the images on flickr, not present on the edits of my original (uploaded to smugmug for archiving/sales).

[Harshad Barve]

lovely looking bird and great advise by Arthur here
TFS

[Fernando Cerra]

I like the face expresion, dislike the black frame

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks for the comments!

Believe it or not, I haven't done much lightening in post-processing here, just a very very minor levels adjustment to try to right the image. 580ex was set to high speed synch (maybe wrongly), and I cranked up the power a bit. I find that when I'm nearing minimum focusing distance with the 500 f/4 + tc, even the bare flash can lift a shadow or 2.

I've actually burned the perch highlights a decent amount, it took the brunt of the harsh light. Black border is just because I host the images on flickr, not present on the edits of my original (uploaded to smugmug for archiving/sales).

At 1/80 sec. HS Synch has zero effect. Your statement about filling a shadow or 2 is where you have erred. When you are attempting to light the shadowed side of a backlit bird you should be thinking flash as main light not flash as fill. You needed to set your flash somewhere around zero in ETTL or experiment if using Manual flash... Black border is still ugly smugmug or not. More in a sec.

[Arthur Morris]

You cannot burn detail where there is none to start.... You needed to underexpose enough to prevent burning the highlights and then use lots of flash to light the shadowed side of the bird as above. There is tons of info on this in the ER.

Whatever you did, the bird looks flat (with little contrast) and the colors look muddy.

The image here shows the clipping.

[Arthur Morris]

ps: Most of the burned highlights were on the bird's back (with only a few on the perch) but that does not change anything above.

[Dave Blinder]

You cannot burn detail where there is none to start.... You needed to underexpose enough to prevent burning the highlights and then use lots of flash to light the shadowed side of the bird as above. There is tons of info on this in the ER.

Whatever you did, the bird looks flat (with little contrast) and the colors look muddy.

The image here shows the clipping.

Thanks for the tips Arthur, and couldn't agree more on the image looking flat and muddy. It's funny, in the heat of the battle the lighting and histogram didn't look that bad originally.

[Arthur Morris]

YAW and understood. They always look great on the back of the camera! Thank you for being open and receptive.