White Guy

[ewaizel]

[Hillbillygirl]

Little on the dark side, but nice detail captured on this Great Egret.

[Marko]

Agree with HBG on all counts.

[jjeling]

Yes, these guys are correct on the darkness, however, white animals like this are quite difficult to capture without blowing out the whites. My experience tells me it is "safer" to capture all white animals with a slightly reduced exposure to retain as much texture and detail of the animal, and then start with your PP work. Reason being is you may never be able to recover blown highlights. Lost information is just that, lost. Composition here seems to be ok, I might crop the first image a little tighter, but that's it.

[ewaizel]

Thanks for the comments guys!

[Barefoot]

...My experience tells me it is "safer" to capture all white animals with a slightly reduced exposure to retain as much texture and detail of the animal, and then start with your PP work.

Different strokes, I guess. For me, I would have spot metered the bird and then over exposed by anywhere from a third to a full stop. But, that might be why no one ever sees my Egret shots.

[jjeling]

That could be my problem as well. 99% of the time I am in manual mode, and when I shoot birds stay in that mode as well. Check out my flickr and you will see that I do not have much experience with birds, only snow. This is why I suggested that. It seems easier to me to slightly underexpose because I cant recover blown highlights. At least I know if the image is slightly underexposed I have the details of the image, its just a matter of compensating the levels from that point on. Too dark can also be a problem as well, its a fine line. The other advantage is a slight underexposure also allows you to keep shutter speeds up too, which really helps with birds. I'll be testing out my theories this weekend..... Nothing beats a perfect exposure, but I'm not a fan of the nanobot guy inside my camera..... Clearly I'm not a birder.

[Barefoot]

Nothing beats a perfect exposure, but I'm not a fan of the nanobot guy inside my camera..... Clearly I'm not a birder.

Perfect exposure is a bourgeois concept.

I made my pervious comment based on the fact that our cameras wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the bright areas of rippled water shown in this shot from a blanket of fresh snow. What looks like a properly exposed shot in the viewfinder's metering will likely be underexposed. This explains it much better.

Two reasons I'll not say anything more about it here:

1) I'll just end up putting my foot in my mouth if I do. (love to here from Marko or the true birder here, HBG)
2) We've hijacked ewaizel's thread.

[jjeling]

I'd like to think we haven't totally hijacked the thread completely. Hopefully there is some good information out there that is going to help him next time? The concept of a perfect is an interesting concept but deserving of another thread. Anyways....


ewaizel keep shooting! Nothing is more gratifying than knowing you just took a great image.