As some people may remember , I purchased a second hand canon 10d.
One of the first things I was advised when I posted about it, was to take it out of the pre programmed zones and enter the world of “M” or manual. So today , I’m at the mall on something unrelated, I popped into Henrys, our version of B&H of Adorama for information on a photo show thats happening in May, and walked right by an exhibit of raptors.
At first I thought they were sculptures, as they were so still until one turned its head. From here , I simply walked into henrys , chatted about a prime lens for a few minutes then split and went back to grab the truck and bring it round to the parking lot adjacent to the camera store and the raptor exhibit.
Grabbed the cam and the tripod and asked the exhibitors if there was any problem with me taking photos.
The Camera was set to manual anyways and I did not want to use the Flash, even though they never mentioned any restrictions with the birds beyond getting close to them. Which was no real problem, as thats why I planned on using the long lens which was a 75-300mm 1:4-5.6. Iso was set at 400 and 1/500 and 7.2 fstop for most of the shots, download the image and the exif for that particular one should be encoded.
That website is mine and clean, regardless of what the title might suggest. Its just a wordpress blog site that I have been deciding what to do with.
Until I got talking with another photo guy, I may as well have been using the lens cap when taking the shots and I was trying everything I could think of to add light, before he advised me to switch to Av and change the fstop to 4.5. He thought everything else was okay other wise, but…
Anyways , this one image was a mistake but still I like it.
Looking through the pictures for facebook, I came across another picture of the same bird that has just a touch more light and looks almost silkscreened
I thought all birds of prey were called raptors, I of course watched Jurassic park so I am familiar with the velioraptors(spelling is wrong). If I could get a shot of those guys , I’d have more than a few pennies in the bank, mind you, I’d probably want a 1200 mm zoom lens to shoot them with.
The birds at the exhibit, included a snowy owl and a big honkin owl that looked like a cat with wings, and I still had this primal urge to run very far away, even tho the bird seemed docile.
Very cool. Sometimes it’s the photos that “turn out wrong” that communicate more than the “right” ones. Once when I was in Paris for Bastille Day, I was shooting the fireworks. In one shot, someone bumped my tripod . . . and I got this.
This was an indoor exhibit? With an f4.0 lens (at best), you probably want to crank the ISO up to at least 800, open the f-stop all the way, and you’ll be lucky to get a shutter speed of 1/125 of a second. Which should be fine, given that the raptors weren’t moving much.
Your original settings would be more suitable for a sunny day outdoors. (Although for wildlife, I like to keep my shutter speed at least 1/1000 second).
Yes, birds of prey are called raptors. I am a bird person, I once worked at a wild bird rehab facility and have a soft spot for raptors but even I thought of velociraptors first. Then again, I haven’t had my coffee yet. Nice picture though.
My computer screen is/was somewhat dusty; dusty enough to diffuse and hide the crown and eyes of the actual bird. So, what I thought I saw was a menacing scavenger with a bright head (which is actually the birds nasal area, with the nasal opening appearing like eyes) with diffuse plumage coming out of the head. Also I thought the bird’s shoulders were actually the outspread wings. When I first saw it, it looked like some gothic painting of an evil bird with an oversized beak extending from a small dingy white head, flying in to get some carrion. Then, to study the picture further, I dusted my screen and saw a totally different bird.
Why not just bump up the exposure in post?Here’s what your photo looks like with a simple levels adjustment and +1 exposure. You’ll notice most of the detail is still there, you just weren’t seeing it due to the underexposure.
Thanks , I’ll keep that in mind. I did mention that there was another guy shooting as well, and he advised to keep it on Av and drop the fstop to 4.5 at 75mm, and lo and behold, there was light.
It kind of blew my mind that I was getting almost no light on the sensor, in a well lit mall at 4 pm.
I’ll post a shot of the owl, taken in the Av mode, but the iso was definitely 400 or 500 at f4.5
I’l concede that its possibly the monitor settings, its just a normal laptop and I dont put the grafix card through its paces. But it does look like it was truncated one third of the way through download, its just not doing anything beyond that.
