Taken at Caladesi Island,FL
Canon 100-400mm 4.5/5.6L IS USM
400mm
ISO 100
F5.6
1/800 sec
Not sure how the feathers are so much lighter than the background...
Last edited by Jay Bernstein; 11-14-2010 at 12:24 AM.
Reason: forgot attachment
Hi Jay
Nice study and I love the colours in the water, especially the little dots of blue amongst the green under the bird.... I think the HA is slightly off for some and I think this could be a touch sharper also. What do you think?
Hi jay - Think the HAP may want to question you over this one.
Detail and Colours look good - think I would have tried to get a bit lower to improve the shooting angle if possible,
Feels a little bit tight at the bottom for the virtual feet - once again due to the angle. Might not have been possible from your position in which case I think you have done the best you can except for that HA - Needs to be towards you a tad rather than away.
Keep em coming :)
Lance is right on the head angle (HA). Also, you've got some clipping in the whites...look at the top of the leg and the one patch of white on the body - they both are lacking detail from overexposure. Since you're wondering why the feathers are so much lighter than the BG I'd say you may have overexposed the image a bit OR your light angle was playing against you. (You didn't mention using flash so I'm assuming that's not the problem here.)
Overall, you got some good detail throughout the entire body as far as sharpness and the BG is beautiful and complimentary to the bird's plumage. Try to remember to get that HA looking towards you, leave a little extra room at the bottom for those "virtual feet" and watch for any blinkies on your histogram when shooting in the field...it will save you much time in post-processing if you get it right while you're there!
It appears your image is at least 1 stop more exposure then you needed for the bird. Notice that the water is well exposed. If you were using an auto exposure mode, it is reading the BG as a dark tone and adjusting exposure up to compensate.
You would need to use the exposure compensation control and decrease exposure.
Is this from a RAW file? Are you using your histogram? With the histogram, you can see if your exposure is not clipping the highlights by looking for a tall spike on the right of the graph.
Getting the exposure right in camera makes your post processing much easier. And in the case of strong light like you had here a reverse s-curve can be used to lower contrast. See my tutorial here for information.
Hey Jay,
Yep......HA mentioned....not a killer BTW.....just stronger with a slight turn towards us. Some of the other issues on brightness mentioned but wonder if you revisit this in Post if you can tweak some of the suggestions? Really close on this one and looking forward to more!
Tri-Colored Heron
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