This moose was photographed in Glacier National Park. He was dining on underwater plants growing in the laker. Very difficult lighting conditions. Late evening, He had just shed his velvet and antlers were very white. Easy to blow out the antlers. Any suggestions on camera settings for this difficult photo would be appreciated.
Canon MarkII with Canon 500mm f/4 IS lens @ f/4, 1/1000, ISO 400.
Louis, the light is quite striking and has provided plenty of detail in the fur. You don't mention if you were using exposure comp to help the clipping on the near antler. Opened this in RAW and can see clipping in the blacks and highlights. (to be expected as fairly contrasty). Worth going back to the RAW file and trying the recovery slider to help the blown antler, but I doubt it as once detail is blown, there is none to recover.
Looking at your meta data, you used spot and Auto. Manual may have been better, or AV and -1. Tricky one. Not sure if you do use it, but do you set your histogram to show clipping on the camera? It wasn't going anywhere fast and doing so would have let you adjust your settings. Cheers.
I agree with David's suggestions. Try to expose in which ever metering you are comfortable with (evaluative, spot, manual etc) and ensure that the histogram is close to the right without touching it. If you have the highlight warning on, then you can see the blinkers in the blown highlight areas. Once the whites are blown, then can't be recovered. So better to be careful while exposing.