The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This is mama again – she seemed to be doing more work than papa, but both were getting pretty ragged. This had to be a second brood. Very foggy morning light.
I love the high key lighting. The white background really places the focus on the bird. Then with the bird, I love the feather curl on its left wing tip and the translucent wing feathers. Did you use a flash? That catchlight in the eye is wonderful.
Diane: Of course I’m not a bird guy but I got a nice little -meter spike from this one. Fabulous color palette and detail in the feathers and the high key presentation elevates this to art vs mere imaging excellence. Many kudos. >=))>
Another excellent flight shot, Diane. I really like the slightest bit of motion bur on the ends of some of the wing feathers. This is a tough one to frame. Even with the bird looking to our right, I think I’d move her in that direction a bit, but it’s a really tough call. Since there’s no horizon, you could play with rotating her clockwise until the head and body posture work together.
Thanks, @Youssef_Ismail, @Bill_Fach and @Dennis_Plank! Flash won’t sync at a fast SS – even if high-speed sync would work, it would attenuate the intensity hugely, and I’m not sure what it would do paired with rolling shutter. At 20 fps I played it safe with two bright shop lights, which were barely enough.
Another excellent bird image. Really good detail and as. Dennis states, the little blurry of motion in the wing tips is an excellent feature. Enjoyable to look at.
Missed this one, Diane, and am happy I finally saw it. Congrats! I’m just curious about the shop lights you mention as fill lights. Were they on a porch? How did you get the bird lit by them?
Thanks, @Mike_Friel! There is a deck on the west side of the house, 15 ft wide, with the roof extending over it and about a foot beyond, supported with heavy posts on the ends. The birdhouse is on the south post, facing south. It is shaded until just past noon, and when it is in the sun it is in backlight, so there is never good light on the birds. (We have other houses in better light but they prefer this location, maybe because there is a big redwood tree about 30 ft to the south that gives them cover while they watch the nest.) The deck and railing continue south from the post and they were using the railing as a staging perch when approaching the nest. So I put up a vertical branch about 15 ft from the box and they started using it. That let me put the camera on a tripod and manually focus on the flight path and just hit the shutter on burst mode when one launched for the nest. But in any sky conditions there was too much contrast, with the visible side of the birds in the shade, so I put up some LED shop lights and was able to get workable exposures. I needed to shoot bursts at 20 fps and as high a SS as I could get (1/6000 or more), which eliminated flash. Although LEDs flicker, I had more than one (eventually 4) and they apparently cancelled one another. There were a lot of frames where they were not well enough in the focal plane, but enough that were in focus with good poses to make it worthwhile.
Thanks so much - it’s very interesting to hear the details of how you took this shot, Diane. I’m thinking of using LED panels as a complement or alternative to flash. A much smaller scale than yours, but I must remember what you say about the flicker. Your hard work really paid off here.
@Mike_Friel, the flicker is very fast – generally 100-120 Hz, so would only be an issue at high SSs. Just do some quick checks indoors at several SSs. Steady lights are definitely easier to control than flash.
-meter spike from this one. Fabulous color palette and detail in the feathers and the high key presentation elevates this to art vs mere imaging excellence. Many kudos. >=))>