Birds from this month.

[Glen Roberts]

It's been a while since I posted any shots but here's a few for this month.
All taken Handheld with the Canon 400mm.

Cormorant.

Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Goldfinch and Lesser Redpoll.

Siskin.

Oystercatcher.

Crossbills.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Love #2 and also the Oystercatcher - you got great eye contact in both as well

 

[Dan Cattermole]

Number 3 is my fav, amazing !!! Well done

 

[Darren Turner]

nice set as always Glen, i think image 3 is my favourite as you have two types of bird at the same time on the feeder.......The quality, clarity & colour is awesome on this shot (Them L's are good aint they)

I also like the last, very unusual looking birds to me.....not something you see every day.

Daz

 

[Pete Askew]

Looks like I might be the odd one out here but my favourite is number 1 (although I'd probably crop a tiny bit off the top).

 

[Lee Webb]

I LOVE the oystercatcher shot, it's very much my style of shooting wildlife and love the low angle. The clarity is really excellent too although I think you might have clipped the whites in the wing a little, it might be worth trying to pull them back to get a little more detail out of them.

 

[Glen Roberts]

I always find it hard not to clip the whites on predominantly black birds. I tried to pull them back a bit but I'm not too good with processing and couldn't get a right balance, without making the rest of the shot too dark.

 

[Lee Webb]

If you're having trouble, try under exposing a little (-0.3/-0.7EV) then pushing the exposure back up in post processing. Under exposing keeps information but over exposing an image and clipping the highlights gets rid of it. Under exposing when the shot is taken is the most reliable way of keeping some detail in the highlights.

 

[Pete Askew]

There should be plenty of dynamic range in a modern DSLR to cope with both black and white feathers but you need to make sure your meter is not being biased (don't forget, it is trying to give you 18% grey of the area / areas it is metering). Although slightly under exposing will help prevent you blowing highlights (and the best you can probably achieve much of the time if shooting JPEG's), it is not the best way of maximising the information in your files. If you are shooting raw files you should, if anything, aim towards very slight over-exposure of the brightest highlights you wish to retain rather than under (although obviously you don't want to over-expose the whole image). Using a raw file, you can recover at least one stop of apparent clipping (don't forget, often you are seeing a JPEG view with the histogram) using the recovery slider during conversion to an 'analogue' format. If you try to do this using levels (and to a certain extent curves) after conversion you will have trouble balancing the dynamic range. I know Larry has described the issue somewhere on the forum, but there is a very good explanation here:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

And a much more in-depth treatment in this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-World-...ef=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300210920&sr=8-1-spell

I hope it helps.

 

[Lee Webb]

I understand that for best results you should always look at a slight over exposure (all of my cameras are set to a base metering +0.3EV above default) but you can't say that for when photographing a bird whereby the whites are blown on a normal exposure that the best thing to do is overexpose it further? I think in these situations there is little that can be done, other than try to lower your initial exposure. Surely?

 

[Pete Askew]

You are of course right Lee. If you are getting overexposed images then increasing exposure is certainly not a solution. What is probably happening is that the metering pattern / strategy is not right for the conditions / elements being photographed. Matrix metering etc is pretty damned good these days but in specialised conditions it may well get it 'wrong'. Experience from similar conditions / shots and metering from a mid-grey equivalent region lit in a similar way to the target may be a solution (and then either shifting eV or setting exposure manually). 'Exposing to the right' just ensures maximum information (although if every element is in the higher register then there will be less negative impact as signal to noise will be inherently high).

 

[Ralph Thornton]

My fav is the woodpecker. He's really got his eye on me when I'm looking at the photo.