Royal Tern, shot on a sand bar in the mouth of the Alafia River with Capt. James Shadle, for this one we left the boat on foot and set up in shallow water with the setting sun behind us and a west wind.
EOS 1D MKIII
500 mm f4L IS USM + 1.4 TC
Tripod and Wimberly head
Manual mode
1/1000 sec
f/5.6
iso 800
evaluative metering -0.67 EC
Nice details, exposure looks good, really like the wind blown feathers. Fish certainly adds a lot! Nice background. Only thing it is hard to see the catch light, but from that angle...not surprising. :)
Joel- I'm just trying to work though your exposure. So the S16 exposure would be 1/800s at f16 for a well-lit midtone subject. You are a full 2 2/3 stops over this, which is presumably to compensate for the time of day (setting sun). If you used 1/800s, an f5.6 aperture would be called for in "heavy overcast" conditions and f4 for sunset (not sure if this means an actual sunset or just a setting sun?). A lot depends on how you interpret the light levels at the time you are making the image. I know here, we often have pretty clear, pollution-free skies, and the sun intensity before it sets seems pretty high. If you opened up by 2 2/3 stops from S16 in these conditions, the whites may go. BTW what does -0.67 EC mean in the context of manual exposure using S16??
Anyway just thinking out loud really.
I like the image- always a bonus to have a prey item in the bill. Nice ruffle. Could do with a slight CW head turn and a CCW rotation of the whole image to straighten up.
Last edited by John Chardine; 09-11-2010 at 08:24 PM.
Hi Joel - like the ruffled look and the fish is a bonus - exposure looks good though a little confused by the -0.67 EC also - not sure that the exposure compensation has any effect when shooting in manual mode - but then I use Nikon so not too sure.
Good show :)
Perhaps I am not writing the exposure data description properly, here is what happened : at around 4:30 pm it was clear and sunny...using the rule, we used ISO 400 f/8 1/2000 but as light diminished or when clouds briefly passed in front of the sun I kept metering off the sand and correcting the settings to keep the exposure at zero then for white birds I dialed some negative exposure (-0.67 = -2/3 stops)
Maybe that makes more sense, anyway that's how I remember it. Thanks for looking and commenting.
Lesson - Sunny 16 Rule
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