Preening Brown Pelican... Breeding, not Oily Plumage
In honor of the capping of the BP oil well (keeping fingers crossed), here is a picture of a Brown Pelican in breeding plumage (the red throat) taken in San Diego. I like the rheumy eye, which shows up fine here but a little better at full size.
A couple interesting things about this picture: In person, the pelicans looked relatively drab, but the colors and feathers really came to life when I blew up the pictures back home. Secondly, I had to take a lot of pictures to get just one I really liked, with the beak carefully silhouetted against the blue sky. I'm sure everyone else already knows this, but I worry about wasting disk space, when instead I need to shoot at max speed when the opportunity is right.
Image: Nikon D90 with 70-300mm VR at 195mm. f/5.6, ISO 200, 1/1000 sec. Minimal or no cropping. I'm happy with the great image quality of the D90. On the web, this is pretty good, but at full size the details in the feathers are really wonderful. Do I really need 18 or 24 mpixel?
This image was backlit by bright daylit sky. I needed to shift the exposure by -2 EV. (I just checked; -2EV actually underexposed me, but I've become really gun-shy about highlights) I think I need to get better at setting manual exposure. Also, I added contrast by using the sliders in apple-M (Image:Adjust:Curves). I probably enhanced the contrast as well.
Great preening pose and feather details, Tom. I love the sky with hints of cloud. wrt to megapixels more isn't always better. Lighting angle wasn't ideal but looks quite nice and diffused. A little fill flash may have been an option to put a bit more light on the shaded part of the bird and would have popped the plumage and colours a bit. The histogram is probably your best friend with getting exposure right - try to keep it touching the right side without clipping (or only slightly clipping if shooting RAW) to maximise the amount of info recorded by your sensor and so minimise noise. Lots of good info in the educational resources forum and Artie's Digital Basics File great value. Looking forward to more of your birds.
Yeah, I like the bokeh-ed, cotton-ball clouds. The blue sky plays off the yellow head and red throat, which makes a bold palette.
While this was back-lit, I'm not sure it's lacking in color.
Yes, when I used -2EV I pulled things away from the right side. I think I have sufficient dynamic range that I didn't lose too much. In terms of optimization, I'm happy with getting maximum pixels on the bird so I didn't need to crop.
Last edited by Tom Stermitz; 08-19-2010 at 10:05 PM.
I highly reccomend manual exposure mode. It puts you in complete control of your exposures and I think it really helps improve your photograhy in a number of ways. One valuable tool people often overlook is the flashing highlight alert. The blinkies are often much more useful than the histogram. If the brightest highlights in the frame are not part of the subject, the histogram is pretty much useless. The blinkies will show you where the blown highlights are and allow you to find the threshold of blown highlights on the subject. This lets you find the best exposure in most situations and allows you to expose for the subject.
I like the pose and bg in your image, but I think the shadowed lighting is not ideal.
More high quality pixels can be a real advantage, but "high quality" is the key to that advantage. For example, I much prefer the IQ of the 1D4 to that of the 7D.
Thanks Robert. You didn't even do that much, but it helped a lot.
So you selected the background, then invert... via magic wand or via magnetic lasso? Fortunately the background is dramatically different from the bird and hut.
Preening Brown Pelican... Breeding, not Oily Plumage
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