Hello All,
Yesterday I traveled to Fulton, IL where there are a great concentration of bald eagles located at Lock and Dam #13 on the Mississippi River. The weather was cold and overcast and I was losing light each minute I was photographing. I have included one of my images which I am quite disatisfied with. I am shooting with a Nikon D3 with a Nikon 500mm and 1.4 tele-extender, perched on a Gitzo Tripod with a Kirk King Cobra head. The birds were probobly 200 to 500 yards away from me and I think that is probobly too far for the kind of sharpness I expect from myself and my equipment. Out of close to 400 images shot I kept only 15, not too good and those I kept were not all that great. My questions are many. Is that distance just too far? I know the closer one gets the better the results. What is causing the heat waves around the primaries? I beleive the imahges suffered from being about a stop under exposed. This was done to keep the head and tail from burning out. Wrong adjustment? The other shooting information is as follows: f/6.3 @ 1/3200sec, Aperture priority, ISO 200, WB: Auto, Flash off.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Last edited by Arthur Morris; 01-05-2008 at 06:42 PM.
Bringing the RAW file one stop at conversion will cause a lot of problems in color, even in a camera like the D3.
My suggestion is to try and get the correct exposure, and the better that is, the better your image will look.
There is no need to use iso 200 with that camera. You could have easily gone to 1000 with that flat light ( I would go even higher with some warmth to the light)
That way, you could have decent shutter speed without overexposing.
About your image, love the V shape and it looks sharp at this size. It may have noise at the full size, from the processing needed.
Thanks for your suggestions. To answer Axel's qustion about dialing in exposure compensation. No I did not. I am very new to the camera and am trying out the light meters to see how they work with no changes.
The sky looks brighter than a middle tone(bright overcast).
The main body of your subject is darker than a middle tone.
With the original image having the eagle small in the frame, the sky was the main influence on your camera's meter.
Camera meters are not so smart. The try to render everything as a middle tone.
With white skies, The image will be underexposed and the sky will rendered as a middle tone unless we compensate for the camera meter's incorrect assumption.
The under-exposure makes feather detail even harder to pull out without introducing noise.
Eagles can be tough because of their white head.
But in this case(overcast skies) you could add the 1 to 1 2/3 (depending on camera) stops of light to correct the exposure or compensate for the meters stupidity with out burning the details on the Eagles head.
James
Last edited by Arthur Morris; 01-05-2008 at 06:43 PM.
James does it just how I do it most of the time. Another option to experiment with (especially if the light is consistent) is to use EC to get your exposure dialed in just right by checking the histogram and exposing as far "to the right" as possible and then switching to manual and duplicating the shutter speed and aperture settings. That way the bird will be properly exposed no matter what background it flies in front of (since you're on manual, you don't have to worry about the background dominating your automatic metering). It only really works well in consistent light, but is a great way to ensure bird in flight images are exposed well, because you just can't predict exactly where a bird will fly unless it's baited.
Good job by all above. Lots to learn. I like the image a lot; it looks just fine as a j-peg. Just before next Christmas or your birthday, toss your King Cobra head into the nearest lake or river and get yourself either a Wimberley V-2 or the Mongoose M3.5. Please do not take it personally but the KC is a piece of junk best used as a cod-fishing weight...
later and love, artie
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