Photographic birds with dark eye/plumage

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GerryD

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Gerald Davies
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Hello all

I've struggle a lot with birds with dark plumage on the head and dark eyes.

How are you exposing with this?

Also how do you cope with birds with the above and also have white plumage?

Thanks in advance

Gerald
 
If you can, take a meter reading from something neutral, i.e grass.
Make sure the lens is out of focus before taking the reading.
This technique can be used for any subject.

HTH
 
One i also struggle with. So many of the blighters are Black and White, get one right and the other is a mess. I will give Matts suggestion a try.
 
Why make sure the lens is out of focus before taking a reading, Matt?
 
Matt said:
If you can, take a meter reading from something neutral, i.e grass.
Make sure the lens is out of focus before taking the reading.
This technique can be used for any subject.

HTH
Click to expand...

Thanks Matt.

I'll try this technique on my next outing, but why out of focus?

Gerald
 
Spot meter off a dark feather area of the bird - not deep in the shadows or on a bright sunlit back - just averagely lit feathers - and set a manual exposure 2 stops below the centre of the meter. For a grey bird, centre the meter needle. For a white bird set the meter to +2 stops. Fire a test shot, chimp the histogram and adjust and try again if need be.

If you are shooting raw and have a scene with a dark bird - e.g. a crow, without paler feathers - and nothing brighter in the frame than tree leaves then you could actually meter the crow at 0, or perhaps -1, rather than -2. This will give you an overexposed (grey) crow, but will capture plenty of detail and you can then fine tune the final appearance of the shot by adjusting the levels/curves/exposure in post processing.
 
taxi said:
Hello all

I've struggle a lot with birds with dark plumage on the head and dark eyes.

How are you exposing with this?

Also how do you cope with birds with the above and also have white plumage?

Thanks in advance

Gerald
Click to expand...

Try and position yourself so the sun is behind you.
When shooting into the light with black/dark birds it can be almost impossible to bring out feather detail while still maintaining a balanced exposure for the background as well. Direct, bright sun from behind can look amazing on very dark birds. For example shags and cormorants have iridiscent colours in their feathers you never see till you get bright sun behind you.

For birds that have white on as well it's still best to have the light behind you but more subdued or even overcast light is best. So that you don't get the glare from the white parts.
A quite bright day with a thin layer of hazy cloud is about the best light you can get for bird photography.

I think the biggest advance i made with my images was when i finally got it into my thick skull how to position myself in relation to the sun.
 
I think Werecow is right - this is a lighting problem rather than an exposure one.

Accurate exposure control will make the most of the subject, but it won't change the light.

You need to get some brightness in there, to highlight the texture and colour. If the subject is black and drab, then that's how the camera will record it.
 
Take a spot reading off the BRIGHTEST white part of the image, dial in +1 3/4th (+1.5 if your camera only has half stops) EC, recompose and fire away.

This will ensure that the brights are rendered as brights, without blowing them off. If the darkest parts of the scene do faill within around 5 stops of light, they will be rendered without blocking up.

You can then adjust the image to restore the original tonal values in PS.

It's advisable to shoot RAW, btw.

Hope that helps.

nevilleb
 
Here's a shot of a bird with dark plumage, taken this afternoon. EXIF is 400 ISO, f/7.1, 1/1000, manual exposure. As you can see, the conditions are pretty bright sunshine, although there was a slight haze, just toning down the brightness a bit. Let's compare the exposure here with a "Sunny 16" exposure of f/16, 400 ISO, 1/400.

f/7.1 is 2 1/3 stops brighter than f/16.
400 ISO is the same for both.
1/1000 is 1 1/3 stops dimmer than 1/400.

So overall my exposure is 1 stop brighter than it might normally be under full on Sunny 16 conditions. i.e. the sunlight was about 1 stop dimmer than Sunny 16, due to the haze, so I compensated by shooting 1 stop brighter.

This was shot raw but has had no edits other than a small crop and a resize to show here. The feather detail does not show well in this tiny version of the image....

Here is the histogram, and the edit history, showing that all I did was to crop....

MWSnap%202009-03-18%2C%2016_24_18.jpg


20090318_133508_2789_LR.jpg


but if we look at a 100% crop the detail should all be there....

20090318_133508_2789_LR.jpg


I'm afraid the DOF is quite shallow (400mm and f/7.1 @ 10'-15' gives a DOF of around 1", so the feathers quickly become out of focus as we move away from the eye, but I'm happy with the image. The exposure is good and the detail is there where it needs to be.

Here's an example shot this morning, this time of a brilliant white bird. Conditions were brighter so my exposure is reduced a bit compared to this afternoon. For this shot I was actually shooting at an exact Sunny 16 exposure - 400 ISO, f/8 (2 stops brighter than f/16), 1/1600 (2 stops dimmer than 1/400, thus equivalent to Sunny 16. I think it turned out pretty well, exposure wise. Nothing is blown in the highlights and nothing is crushed in the shadows/blacks.

MWSnap%202009-03-18%2C%2017_02_42.jpg
 
tdodd, Werecow and HoppyUK some really useful information there.

I'm slowly figuring out getting the sun behind me, and I've found a few locations that will allow me to do that now, and you can see the difference straight away.

As for the exposure compensation, it's something I've never tried. I'm going to print out the details below and give it a go tomorrow after work.

tdodd, I'd use spot metering as standard due to the birds small size. I think its learning now how to expose for the birds plumage.

Thanks

Gerald
 
dupliucate post :(
 
taxi said:
tdodd, I'd use spot metering as standard due to the birds small size. I think its learning now how to expose for the birds plumage.

Thanks

Gerald
Click to expand...
For these shots, although I checked things now and again with my spot meter I actually arrived at these exposure settings by starting from a "Sunny 16" exposure, shooting a test shot and checking for highlight clipping on sunlit white feathers. I then tweaked as necessary to make sure that I had just the barest hint of clipping on a few feathers, knowing that I could recover tiny clips from my raw image files quite easily. Once the exposure was set it worked well for white birds, dark birds or birds of mixed plumage.

Once I had dialed in a perfect exposure for the lighting conditions I did check by metering from my palm. Sure enough, the meter read +1 1/3. I don't use the palm method as much as I should. It really is a very solid way to get a "correct" exposure. I was able to meter quite well enough from my palm even with my 100-400 + lens hood at full stretch (as was I :) ).

If you want to meter from the bird then consider the swan. There are some feathers on the body/wings that are dazzling white, right on the edge of clipping, while those on the neck are really not very bright at all. You need to really think about what part of the bird you are metering and how bright it is in the great scheme of things. e.g. if you spot metered off the brightest feathers on the body you should probably set the meter for +3, as there is nothing in the scene brighter than those feathers. If you metered off the neck then perhaps +2 would be a safer bet - hopefully the feathers on the body are no more than 1 stop brighter than the neck. But in case they are, check your image and histogram for clipping, just in case you need to dial it down a bit.

For a dark bird, with no bright parts, white or coloured, then you could perhaps spot meter at -2, as a starting point, and that should catch you some decent detail in the dark plumage. Once again, check for things in the scene that might be blowing/clipping that you would prefer not to blow. e.g. there might be a white bird in the background that becomes so overexposed that it looks like pure, flat white. That would probably spoil your shot.
 
Here's another solution to the lighting problem, to inject a bit of life into dark but shiny plumage - Kirk Flash Extender £37. You also get a nice highlight in the eye.

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/product/default.aspx?sku=1013209

I used it with a Canon 580EX with a Blackbird and although the pics were rubbish, the light was quite nice. Used as fill-flash just to lift things a bit, at the kind of range you need to get a frame filler of most birds, it gives the flash enough power for f/5.6 or f/8 ISO400, even outside no problem.
 
Thanks all lads, I hadn't forgotten about this, I'm just waiting for a nice day, a rarity in Scotland at the moment, to go out and try your advice :wave:
 
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