Blackbird bathing!

Briony

Briony

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Nicki.
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Took this today of a Blackbird having a bath in the garden, not the best of shots I know but thought you might like to see it.

Messingabout026-1.jpg


C & C welcome.
 
Briony, as I'm sure you appreciate the original is rather underexposed. I suspect this is because you set a shutter speed of 1/500 at 200 ISO and although the camera tried to open up the aperture as wide as possible it simply wasn't enough. I don't know whether your camera has a "Safety Shift" feature but, if it does, it may be helpful to enable it.

I did try reworking your unedited example and think I might have improved it a bit. Here's my effort....

20090521_082004_026_LR.jpg
 
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Thank you it is so much better then really you are saying I needed a faster shutter speed is that right?
 
Noo - slower :)
 
so would I have had to put it SLOWER to say 1/250 or even slower than that.

I meant slower in the first place (to allow more light in):bonk:
 
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Briony are you using a tripod ?

Does your lens have IS?

Can you set Auto ISO on your camera?
 
yes to tripod
what is IS? sorry thicko here
yes I can set auto ISO on here
 
There are a few issues to be considered and without knowing your exact equipment and setup it's hard to give specific advice. The bottom line for this shot is that it was underexposed by about 2 stops. That is a lot. It was caused because (a) the available light was poor; (b) the camera settings you chose made a correct exposure impossible for the camera to achieve. I suspect there would have been some sort of warning in the viewfinder about this, but these things are easily overlooked in the heat of the chase.

Since you were shooting with a 400mm lens on a 450D I think the choice of shutter speed was sound, not only to reduce/avoid camera shake but also to sufficiently freeze the bird's movement. Use of a tripod or IS would have been alternatives to a high shutter speed with respect to camera shake but you still needed the high shutter speed to freeze the bird. Your lens is no faster than f/5.6 at the long end so the only options you had were....

1. Increase ISO;
2. Wait for better natural light;
3. Use an external flash.

I suspect that, all things considered, you should have set ISO to 800 for this shot. If you had shot this in raw it would have made recovery from the exposure error a little easier/better. Underexposed JPEG files are not great to work with.
 
Briony said:
yes to tripod
what is IS? sorry thicko here
yes I can set auto ISO on here
Click to expand...

Image Stabilisation = anti shake thingy on Canon lenses

Ok my typical settings for bird photography:

Auto ISO

Shutter Priority - minimum 1/250 sec - 1/500 for perched birds to eliminate blur from subject movement (assumes that you are on a tripod).

Spot Metering (not pattern or evaluative) you want to expose a small area of the frame, the aim is to expose the bird correctly rather than average out the whole scene (a fair bit of which ends up cropped out anyway).

White Balance - "Sunny" unless really dark grey cloud then use Cloudy, I never use auto white balance, and if you are outside it is sunlight that is the light source.

Make sure the Sun is behind you coming over your shoulder, or just off to one side of you.

Getting the light right is probably the most important consideration, it will make a lot of difference to any photograph no matter what genre.

Your shot of the Blackbird is underexposed, at the shutter speed used ISO would have needed to be up around ISO800. Having the camera set to Auto ISO will sort this out for you.

You can still control the ISO if it starts to get too high by slowing down the shutter speed.

Try that lot, and practice, I did not produce images like the ones I post on here when I first started.

Good luck (y)
 
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