Snowy juvi

[Kerry Perkins]

Captured at the Salton Sea in late afternoon sun, late December.

50D, EF400mm f/5.6L
Manual mode, f/5.6@1/2000 ISO 200 WB 5100K
AI Servo autofocus, hand-held no flash

[WIlliam Maroldo]

You've been doing a good job on the snowys, and this is no exception! My personal preference would be to place the bird a bit more to the left, to give more space to fly into. regards~Bill

[Bob Decker]

Great catch. Some space to the right and above would help a bit but overall a very successful image as presented.

[Kerry Perkins]

Thanks guys, this image is full frame plus - meaning I added canvas to the bottom and left. I was very close to clipping the claws. I could have added more to the right or any other direction, but I wanted to show the feather detail and was willing to sacrifice traditional compositional values for detail. When I get home tonight I will make one with a pano aspect and post it for comparison. I am curious to see what the consensus will be.

[Paul Guris]

Wow. This looks like a cover shot for "How to Expose Whites and Retain Detail". The tight crop really doesn't bother me on this image, though I'll be interested in seeing how a re-post looks.

I guess it's the birding geek in me, but I also love the very obvious and crisp extended alula, that one short feather that appears at the base of the outermost primary. It makes the wing structure more interesting.

[Rachel Hollander]

Kerry - to me this looks great. I like the wing and leg position, nice detail, clean beautiful blue bg. I don't mind the comp.

TFS,
Rachel

[Ian Cassell]

Kerry, I like this one very much. You've done a great job with the whites and I like the comp.

[Kerry Perkins]

Thanks everyone, I appreciate your comments. Here is the re-do with a good amount of space on the right. I like this version too, but prefer the closeup detail in the original. Both images have their place I think and I could have added less room for an even different look. I am interested in your thoughts.

P.S. - looks like I got a slightly different color balance this time too, as I converted from the original TIFF.

[Ian Cassell]

Hey, Kerry. I'm looking at this on an uncalibrated crummy monitor at work, so take this with a grain of salt. I see that you lightened up the BG on your repost and believe, in so doing, you've lost some detail in the whites on the bird's neck and underwing. I think I like the first crop better, although both are good.

[Kerry Perkins]

Ian, you are right about the result although all I adjusted was color balance. The extra blue in the re-post let some of the white pixels get a little toasty. :eek: So the lesson here is that even a slight change in color balance or saturation can cause loss of detail in our images. While none of the pixels in this image are even close to clipping in the luminance, the lack of red in this one takes some of the detail away. It is also scaled differently and there are less pixels on the bird.

[Stan Cunningham]

They are both great, I don't think you lose that much and like the second better but every one is different.
You went a little faster on the shutter than the "sunny 16" rule. I'm still getting frustrated with clipping whites so if you could, tell me how you set your meter for such a perfect exposure with a dark background.
Thanks
Stan

[Paul Guris]

I love both but if I had to choose I think I'd go for the "in your facedness" of the first one. It's much more dramatic when you first look at the image.

[Kerry Perkins]

Stan, the "sunny 16 rule" is another of those "rules" that can be confusing. If you read the definition of this rule, it tells us that "proper exposure for a subject in bright daylight will be f/16 with a shutter speed that matches the reciprocal (1/x) of the ISO of the film" - ok, it was written a long time ago... What might not be generally known is that this rule is talking about the incident light, not the reflected light. Since different subjects reflect more or less of that incident light (your camera meter measures reflected light), you have to adjust your exposure according to what your subject's reflected intensity is. If you think about it, the sunny 16 rule can't possibly be right for every subject. What is a "subject" in the context of the rule? It's a neutral gray "average" subject, also known as "mid-tones". Just like the meter reading from your camera, sunny 16 has to be compensated for the reflected light from your subject. In this case, I only went 1/3 of stop below what sunny 16 would suggest, which is 1/1600 at f/5.6 ISO 200. With white birds it is very easy to over-expose the whites, so checking your histogram with a few test shots is important. You want to expose to the right without clipping (blinkies), as the vast majority of detail (50% actually) comes from that upper 20% of the exposure range in your histogram. This particular shot was taken in bright light against a bright background with lots of reflected light from the beach, which is not sand at the Salton Sea but billions of tiny shells and bones, which reflect even more light.

Another note about manual mode - since I almost always shoot with my 400mm wide open at f/5.6, I use manual mode instead of aperture priority. I have set that aperture manually, so I don't care about making it a "priority". All I have to do is adjust shutter speed and ISO as appropriate for the light on the subject and I don't have to be concerned about exposure compensation based on the camera's meter, which is also reading the background and will try to change the shutter speed. Make any sense? I know that the shutter speed I have set is going to be correct for the white bird regardless of the background, and when I am shooting BIF the background often changes quickly. This works great for me, but I know there will be other opinions... BTW, this doesn't mean that I don't use the meter in the camera. On a given day and location, I will meter an average scene in bright light and another in shade, re-checking if the sunlight changes. This gives me the range of exposures for that amount of light and I adjust shutter speed according to the subject. Checking the histogram verifies the settings and I take it from there. When I am shooting in shade, where the illumination is pretty uniform, I will often use the metered value by dialing the shutter speed until the meter is reading EV 0. So, even in manual mode you need to learn how and when to compensate the meter reading for the scene.

[John Chardine]

Terrific Kerry. Love the repost. Very nice addition of canvas. The whites are perfect on my monitor.

I agree with the comments about the sunny-16 rule. In the "rule" there was always compensation for different tonalities of the subject.

I add something about the rule- as Kerry mentioned, it was designed back in the era of film. Back then I remember one of the standard tricks was to underexpose your slide film by up to a stop to get better colour saturation. In the days of digital we try to do the exact opposite if we are shooting RAW- expose to the right, which often produces a washed out appearance of the image out of the camera. We then of course bring back the exposure in post-processing. This takes most advantage of your sensor's capabilities and produces a less noisy image. What I'm getting at is that in the days of digital, the sunny-16 rule is probably not the best idea because the result would not produce an exposure "to the right". I think we need a new sunny 16 rule for digital RAW- maybe it will be the sunny-11 rule?!

And a comment on Stan's comment that he is still having trouble clipping the whites. I'll add to Kerry's excellent advice and advise Stan to start shooting in manual mode. Once you get the hang of it you will never look back. There are a few situations where manual doesn't work well (e.g., a mobile bird quickly moving in and out of light) but most of the time it does. Manual gives you total control to expose to the right just enough not to clip.

[Stan Cunningham]

John and Kerry,
Thank you very much for the time you took to make your comments. And I think my major problem with not shooting manual is I just have not made it priority because it's often difficult to understand earlier in your experience so I avoided it. But obviously with some what I've learned here in just a couple weeks I need to make more effort and learn as I go.
With that in mind please see if I'm understanding you correctly. From what I've read, I should just set me aperture, and meter from the background whether it be a blue sky at the Salton Sea, or the snowy background surrounding a mule deer, and set the shutter speed based on the meter AND the histogram. Pushing it as far to the right as I can without "blinkies".
When photographing either midtones, dark birds, or white, how much do I need to consider the colors of each? This is still where my confusion lies as I often DON"t know what species will fly by, an egret, black necked stilt, or a cinnamon teal and I don't have time to adjust for it. So then, would I just use the metering I got from the background with histogram and live with the results?
Thanks again for you time.
Stan

[Kerry Perkins]

Stan, not exactly... The goal is to adjust your exposure for the subject, not the background. I have heard it put this way - "shoot the light, not the scene". What I often do is use a tree trunk to stand in for a brown bird. I meter one in the sunlight and one in shade. (I know there aren't always trees around, but anything can serve as a reference.) Knowing what the meter tells me gives me a very good idea of what shutter speed I would use for a brown bird in both light and shade. I also know that I have to compensate for a white bird or a black bird, and you can in fact make these changes very quickly. On my 7D and 50D bodies I have the main dial (in front next to the shutter release) set to adjust shutter speed (this is the default). I can quickly add or subtract light by moving that dial one way or the other, and since I have the camera set to adjust ss in 1/3 stop increments, I know that three clicks equal one stop. It doesn't matter so much what you use to meter for a reference, as long as you know where that subject falls in the scheme of exposure. Some people use the sky as a reference, not pointing toward the sun of course, but maybe 30 degrees above the horizon away from the sun. This reading will give you a reference that is close to what a white bird would reflect and experience will tell you that you have to stop down 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop to get the whites right. For a brown bird, you will need to add light by adding a full stop or more. It is imperative to check your histogram along the way to see if you need to adjust your adjusting, so to speak. When you get into situations like a brown bird with white bars, or worse yet a black bird with white patterns, you need to know that you must expose to protect the whites and how to do that. Practice, practice, practice, and keep track of what you did and what the results were. In time you will find that it comes as second nature. IMO, manual mode is actually easier because you have eliminated one more variable in the equation, which is "what is the meter seeing as opposed to what I want to expose for?". After all, that is what you are doing when you use exposure compensation in aperture priority mode and if you are shooting birds in flight you will very often have varying backgrounds, which is what confounds the meter. Remember, the meter doesn't know what you want to expose for - it just looks at everything in the scene. If the bird flies from a place where the sky is in the background to a place where there are shadows in the background, guess what - the exposure should stay the same!

Have you read Artie's "Art of Bird Photography"? He goes into great detail about how to get exposure right.