Eastern Phoebe

Hi I'm a returning persistant visitor hoping to learn and improve my avian photography. I've strayed over from UKNP once more. I'm seeking Owls and Kingfishers as target species but I'll still take whatever fly's by.

This Eastern Phoebe was visiting my feeding station taken with Canon 1D3 and Canon 800mm ISO400 f8/0 1/800 sec tripod. RAW to lightroom then PS4 to re-size to post. No tweaks I'm lacking in PP expertise.

Your Critique Comments Advice most welcome its the only way I'll learn.

Barry

Milford Kansas

Nice shot of the Eastern Phoebe. Image seems a bit dark. Did you save it with Adobe color space?
Nice hardware too! Looking forward to more excellent images in the near future.

Good point the image is dark and was taken well after sunset. Lighting can be one hell of a challenge. I'd be interested in any pointers. Is it too dark?

Thanks for looking.

Barry

Milford Ks

With a shutter speed of 1/800s you seem to have had enough light. Did you use Evaluative metering? If so, +1/3 or +2/3 might have been just the ticket! If you captured it in Raw, you could still increase the exposure a bit in PS-Bridge or Lightroom.

On my monitor, the bird looks good, with a nice pose, detail, and catchlight. I'm curious what others think of the darkness. I just installed a new monitor and wonder if it isn't still set to bright.

Barry a nicve close up with good detail. I think the light is fine. The colors of the bird look natural. You just have a dark background.

Have you played around with flash fill? With a big telephoto like you have, a flash extension to get the flash farther from the camera focal plane and then a Better Beamer to give extended range might help in such circumstances. I often set the external flash for -1.7 or even -2.0 under such situations. If not overdone, the flash helps fill in the darker areas and may improve the overall detail without much effect on the background (which remains dark).

Hi Daniel

I haven't used any flash I'm very much on the lower slopes of the learning curve so I tend to avoid the technical aspects. I'm still experimenting with the ISO's.

Also trying to improve subjects sharpness and detail. So much to learn.

Barry

Milford

Barry, I really like the pose of the phoebe with the head turn and nice side light. The colors are very nice revealling even the subtle yellows. Shadow detail may have benefited from a bit of fill flash but the image as shown has a wonderful contrast range without losing any detail in the highlights. A fine image in my book.