My wife and I vacationed in SoCal for a few days after attending a conference in San Diego. We stayed a the Marriott on the back bay of Newport Beach. I took this shot about two-blocks from the hotel.
Taken with my Canon 5D2 and 400mm f5.6L at 1/8000 sec, ISO 1600. This is a few minutes after dawn. Processed in DxO's Optics Pro. The Original image (about a 20% crop) can be seen at Original in Flickr , for those with high-speed connections.
David: Nice capture. Good light. Too bad the birds were flying away from you by the time you got them. I'm sure someone else will advise you about sizing for posting here, which would allow a 1024p horizontal size so we could see the image better. Were it mine I might try a more drastic crop, taking off most of the reflection (just above the horizontal stick in the water, and a bit off the right). Others will probably disagree, and it might degrade the quality, but perhaps worth experimenting. In any event, good shot!
tough bird to expose properly with the blacks and whites. always need soft light. looks like you did well. whites are a little hot, but i think manageable with a little more Ps. in images like this, it is better to have to birds flying towards you instead of away. when having multiple birds in the frame, separation between the birds is mostly preferred too.
techwise, i would drop the ISO. will result in images with less noise and a lot easy to process. you had lots of shutter speed. 1/2500s is plenty for flight shots.
Hi David,
A big warm welcome to the BPN family. I like your capture...all of the techs. have been covered and very good advice given. For your next one you can post at a higher resolution...looking forward to your next one...:cool:
Hi David - a big warm welcome to the BPN Family, great advise above - looking forward to seeing more!!
If you have any questions dont hesitate to PM Gus, AL or myself - the educational resources forum has a lot of great info as well.
Welcome, ISO too high, Start with 200 or 400 and try and make things work from there. Good advise given, hang in here and you will improve, nice start. The 400MM 5.6 is one of my favorites. Have you read The Art of Bird Photography II or Digital Basics by Artie Morris?
Great point from Jeff regarding the ISO !!! Optimally you need 2500 for the flight shots and most often will be under 1600 ... and getting good results !!!
Do post at max size for best viewing, best points I can made some already pointed out are having birds coming toward you, a little over exposed, would crop top bottom for a slender proportion (accentuates movement), bird centered and overlapping !!
Welcome! Others covered all aspects with critiques far better than any I could offer. I'm sure you are appreciative as am I for their help. You will learn a lot here! However, I could not resist mentioning that I live near the Back Bay and get over there frequently. Pretty neat place, ain't it . . .
Welcome to BPN.
Lots of good advices have already been mentioned. Just want to add that looking at your Flickr original image I see quite a number of dust spots.
Thanks so much for all the responses. The washed out white under the wing of the top bird gave me fits. I Dodged it, but there wasn't too much to bring up, but it's slightly improved, I think. This is about my fifth pass. Clearly the exposure is too hot. :cool:
I'll clean my sensor. I did take a good bit of the dust out by reprocessing and touching that up. Before I permanently mark any dust I want to clean the sensor first, take a test image and then see if anything is left.
I tried several re-crops. I may not have misunderstood Alfred's suggestion to put the bird in the middle of a vertical crop. I tried putting the top bird in the middle and it had the others going out to the bottom left, which seemed odd to my eye. Maybe he meant to center the group. Anyway, I messed around with crops and ended up as below.
Regarding the ISO, I messed up. I started at pre-dawn and had racheted down once, but needed to get under 1000 by this time (just a few minutes after dawn). Here I've applied NR in DxO's Optics Pro prior to doing the Dodging in PS4.
I'm still messing up on the sizing. I'll reread the Sticky threads to try to get a clue what's going wrong. (My 1024x762 jpg files are way bigger than 200kb, about twice that).
Wendell, yes, the back bay is a very neat place. I want to come back again to get these avocets in their mating plumage. Also, I heard that there are often skimmers there, which I'd love to see.
About capturing BIF coming to you vs. going away, I understand that as an ideal. You particularly don't want nothing but tail feathers. I find that I like this view because I'm seeing their eyes and much feather detail, in action. It's almost a profile. Just my thought.
I know that the spirit here is "perfection" and feel that my photography is already advancing, with just this one lesson. Thanks to all.
What if I cropped it square? Looking at it now, I feel a need to either show more water below (there's partial reflections, sticks and weeds down there) or go square to reduce the amount of sky above the top bird.
About which way the birds are flying. When birds are flying toward you I think the viewer feel more connected to the image than flying away, however sometimes rules are meant to be broken ;)
Thanaboon, thanks for the words and the link. I found the link last night.
I also found a good guide on exposure compensation. No wonder I was overexposed. I was thinking film and not realizing how skewed the digital color balance and lignthing is.
Avocets on Newport Beach back bay
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