What technical feedback would you like if any? Any is appreciated
What artistic feedback would you like if any? Any is appreciated
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
Nikon D810 Nikkor 200-500 f/5.6
F/8.0, ISO 400, 340 mm, 1/2000 seconds… a bit too slow, since there is a bit of motion blur.
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Great action in this shot, Cheryl! The exposure is a little hot with loss of detail on the top of the wings and their backs and as you mentioned, there is some motion blur of one of the wings. A little extra shutter speed would have eliminated both. I don’t know if the D810 has the feature, but I use the over exposure indicator (zebra stripes in the Sony a6500). I just set the aperture where I want it and roll the shutter speed till the stripes appear, drop back one stop and shoot. I set the shutter speed control on the top wheel so it’s easy to operate while shooting. It makes it easy to adjust while I’m following the action, especially when the light is changing as you swing.
Cheryl, the action and the framing look great. The little bit of motion blur doesn’t bother me as it fits with the fighting action. The splashes are great. When you set the camera to show overexposure, it’s important to know if the indicators are based on the raw setting or are taken from the jpeg conversion. For my 5D3, they’re taken from the jpeg conversion that’s used for the camera display. That means that some of he indicated overexposure can be recovered in raw processing. In this case the far wing of the front bird is blown such that it’s probably not recoverable in raw, but it can be “fixed” in post processing by cloning some texture using a 10-15% clone value, possibly repeated. Since that cloning is only adding texture, you can take it from just about anywhere in the image as colors at 15% don’t show
Gary, Thanks for the tips. Just so happy to have folks like you, who will take the time to offer suggestions and good constructive comments. Truly appreciated. Changing the shutter while following the bird sounds like the next new challenge. Just getting on to back button. I have been desperately trying to expose as far right as possible, without blowing it. . As it turns out, NEF and TIF don’t appear to have blown whites but sure enough the JPEG does… I attribute it to some last second adjustment to the JPEG. However, I did go back and was able to create a brush to pull out a lot more detail in the blown areas that you mentioned.
Thanks Mark…As I mentioned to Gary, I so much appreciate the generosity of members spending their time, and sharing their knowledge, pretty darn impressive. I only use “clone”…I will need to research how to use a 10-15% clone value, but it sounds like a killer tool.
