So I went out to a bird sanctuary this afternoon and although I don't really have the huge honkachonka lenses to get really close up pics from a distance, I did ok.
At one point I spotted a kestrel above the reed beds in front of me. After a bit of hovering he swooped over and perched in the tree behind me and I got a couple of pictures off. However, they're way too contrasty with the bird more of a silhouette (pics below). The sun was starting to go down and it was getting dusk so that probably didn't help and a bit of photoshopping brings the picture up a little although the colours are very washed out but what setting can I change in the future to get more of the bird colour and less of the sky. I was running it in aperture priority mode.
Not much you can do Kev. The camera only has so much dynamic range. With the sky back lit against the bird in shadow, you are always going to struggle. To expose the bird properly, you would blow the bejesus out of the sky. From what I can tell, you look to be shooting towards the light, which makes it even harder.
mm was afraid you were going to say that. Yeah I was shooting almost towards the light cos that's where the bird was. I guess I had a lot against me really, light behind the subject, dusk looming, not enough zoomage and not enough talent.
Just wish I could do stuff like this, but it looks like a much sunnier day
Big Kev wrote:mm was afraid you were going to say that. Yeah I was shooting almost towards the light cos that's where the bird was. I guess I had a lot against me really, light behind the subject, dusk looming, not enough zoomage and not enough talent.
Just wish I could do stuff like this, but it looks like a much sunnier day
Much sunnier.
A few things to try. I havent looked at the EXIF so, no idea what setting you used.
Open up the aperture to try and get more light in. Bump up the ISO setting.
Sadly, with the bird where it was, you will always struggle. I dont know how often I went through the same issues when out shooting birds and other animals.
Your shot could have been improved quite a bit by using a different metering mode, using exposure compensation or shooting in manual.
If you used aperture priority & evaluative or average metering the camera would think that your exposure was perfect taking the whole scene into account. If you added + 1 or 2 stops in exposure compensation the bird would look much better but as Norbs says the sky would probably blow out.
If you used spot metering your bird would expose perfectly. The problem with that though is, unless you lock your exposure, you can't recompose. Same problem with the sky though.
Absolutely, the process of converting to jpeg involves throwing away a lot of the range that's in the raw file, it saves a lot of file space, but means you're much more limited in the adjustments you can do afterwards.
Speed wrote:Your shot could have been improved quite a bit by using a different metering mode, using exposure compensation or shooting in manual.
If you used aperture priority & evaluative or average metering the camera would think that your exposure was perfect taking the whole scene into account. If you added + 1 or 2 stops in exposure compensation the bird would look much better but as Norbs says the sky would probably blow out.
If you used spot metering your bird would expose perfectly. The problem with that though is, unless you lock your exposure, you can't recompose. Same problem with the sky though.
I keep forgetting Kev splits atoms for a job and will actually understand stuff like Spot metering that a lot of mug togs just dont grasp.
