My new toys have arrived... I am now the proud owner of a Mk4 & a 500F4. Woo Hoo...!! What a lens, its a real photon funnel, love it. It will be even better once I learn how to use it...;) Anyway, about 5 minutes walk from my house is a bit of bush which is currently hosting about 50 Carnarby Cockatoos which are crunching their way through all the Banksia nuts. The birds are on the endangered list and are not often seen in the city so its a real privilege to point a nice bit of photographic kit at them... Hope you enjoy and feel free to blast away at me.
Hi Don, jealous of the 500! Nice bird and behaviour. Quite a tough exposure with the black and white. Maybe applying a little blur to leaves top and left would give some more background separation.
Hi Don- Great to see this species! You are a lucky man to have them just down the street! I like the eating pose and head angle a lot- lots of interest and eye contact. The habitat adds to the interest but I would maybe think about trimming some off the left- it would be a shape to cut the seedhead though! It will take some time to get used to the new lens you have and extract the image quality it is capable of. There is a little softness in this image but it would likely respond to another round of subtle sharpening. Also I have found that this lens with or without the tc is very sensitive to air quality. This is probably the case for all super-teles. On hot, "shimmery" days, which I'm sure you get a lot of in Perth, image quality can plummet even though you are doing everything right.
Re. the exposure, I agree you have nice detail in the blacks. The bill looks a little hot though and I wonder if you can tone this down in RAW development or processing.
Don, you definitely have a tricky lighting situation here and, on top of that, you have quite a busy BG! However, I love the bird's pose, the catch light in his eye, & the "environmental" look of the image.
Because there is so much going on in the BG I'd suggest a tighter crop. The one I've chosen is only a suggestion but it does get the bird's eye into the ROT's position and it does eliminate a bit of the BG. I had a small piece left in the URC so I cloned that out, giving the eye a place to rest from all that is going on in the image.
You had a bit of an overexposure issue on the beak so I grabbed a light beige color from the properly exposed area and used that at 30% opacity to paint over those blown spots. Luckily, there isn't a lot of lost detail on the beak since it's generally so smooth so painting in the color a bit really helps.
I also applied a gaussian blur to the image. I did an entire layer of the blur then masked back out the bird at 100%, around the bird at 75%, around that area at 50%, and then left the rest at around 25-30%. I also brought up the shadows in the ULC and brought down the brightness in the LRC to help balance the image out a bit more.
All this helps the image along but the proper exposure in the field (probably need softer light in order to do this with how dark/white the bird is) would cut your pp time by 80%.
Julie, thanks for your detailed explanation of the fixes.. It's nice to know how to treat problems you can see but not sure how to deal with. I did consider a tighter crop last night when I posted but normally I go too tight so I resisted this time as I think the Banksia is an interesting plant in itself.
John, The lens is a bit of a handful and I will definately need to improve my technique somewhat to keep the thing under control. I am new with the monopod also so thats something else I have yet to master. My best photos with it have been sitting with the len resting on my knees, but its capability simply amazes me... I have seen posts about the heat shimmer effect and i will keep that in mind. Don't think that was a factor this time however. Regarding the cockatoos presence, well thats seasonal and a prilivege...
Carnarby Cockatoo
