Brown Falcon - Take off at WTP

[yeocsa]

D70 + AFS 300 F4 + TC1.4 + SB800. Handheld.

regards,

Arthur

[stubbsy]

Arthur

On my monitor this image looks a little odd. The feathers under the throat in particular look very blown. But then it may just be me

[kipper]

Nope you're right Stubbsy, they're blown. I took 8-10 shots of this bird and feel like crying

Even with it being shot in RAW I can't bring back the highlights and use Photomatix to try and combine them. It was a bit annoying as the sun had been hiding for most of the morning and was in about 30sec before the bird landed then the cloud shifted and it lit the bird up too much

I've got two that are pretty good. When in harsh sun I think you really need to be in spot metering so that you're exposing for the bird. I dunno what happened, I know I had my flash off and so did Nicole. However a few of my shots vary in exposure. Not sure if Arthur still had his flash on.

[mudder]

That would have been a hard catch in that light, I wouldn't have faired that well... Looking at the bird's feet makes me wonder if the focus was "behind" the eyes? Seems sharpest in the middle of the bird, hmmm might just be my eyes getting that bad

[yeocsa]

Hi Mudder,

Nope. Your eyes are okay. The falcon was about to take off when I had the chance to take this only picture. The head and wings are blurr due to the bird's movement.

The highlights are blown. However, I have the Raw version which i would be able to fix it.

regards,

Arthur

[kipper]

You can to an extent Arthur but once a highlight is blown, it's blown - whether in RAW or not. Mine weren't that harshly blown, and I've tried shifting EV but you can see there isn't any detail in feathers when reducing the EV. It just appears a colored area.

[yeocsa]

Hi Kipper,

That's why most of my images are underexposed. I usually dial -0.3EV and do post processing. I will have more problem if the subject is blacklight and will have to rely more on flash output.

Capturing near white is D70's weakness. It does not have as wide dynamic range as the more expensive bodies. This is the main problem i had when capturing Silver Gulls.

The picture i posted was a jpeg (i had used raw + jpg). In CS2, the software does a auto levels for the jpeg which resulted in the highlights being toasted.

regards,

Arthur

[kipper]

Yeah CS2 the ACR plugin was doing auto on some of my pictures and I was going "urgh, turn it off!". I agree when shooting light color objects it's a good idea dial down by 1/3 or 2/3. Just be careful with dark colored objects (eg. whistling kites). As adjusting the EV too much in NC or ACR can result in grainy images.

[yeocsa]

Hi Kipper,

Yes. I fully agree. Too much under exposure can result in more noise, loss of contrast and details.

regards,

Arthur