A lucky moment. A hooded merganser surfaced from his dive with a crayfish at Viera Wetlands. He was happy and so was I.
Canon EOS 7D
500mm + 1.4 TC
ISO 400 f/5.6 1/3200
Crayfish for breakfast sounds good! I think you could probably brighten the midtones a bit here, Susan. The image looks a little noisy with lack of details as though a big crop and possible under-exposed at capture. Dramatic action though.
I need help with this. I deliberately underexposed by -2/3 stop to keep the whites in tow. The light wasn't that harsh at the scene. It was pretty early. I can't seem to handle this well.
This is a difficult situation to use an auto metering mode, Susan. I agree with your plan on underexposing to save the whites but suspect from the BG that the overall brightness of the image would alter depending on what the water was reflecting - my guess from this is that the meter was already underexposing the bird due to the bright water and the extra -2/3 a bit much. Manual exposure checking against the histogram would be an option. An incident light meter another.