Mousebird Challenge

[Jeni Williams]

• Canon EOS 40D
• EF300mm f/4L IS USM +1.4x
• ƒ/5.6
• 420mm
• 1/800s
• ISO 400
• Flash not fired
• Mon, 25 August 2008 1:23 PM
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows

Here's an original just converted as is to jpeg. Would like to see what the experts can make of it and please tell me what you did, Need help! (No prize for guessing why I hate the "Cl" word!)

 

[Alfred Forns]

Challenge is not the word Jeni !!!! Got a few things in mind but want to see what others come up with btw check your histogram this is a little under .... you open and instant noise !!!

 

[Amy DeStefanis]

Hi Jeni - I notice that this is exported in Adobe RGB. For display in browsers (most browsers), sRBG is going to display better.... I see the same thing in he histogram that Al does. I often find myself reverting to my "film" days when underexposing a little seemed to be the practice. It's hard for me to get that histogram shoved over to the right.

James Shadle had a good explanation for why you want it there during a workshop of his that I took last year (see, I WAS listening....). To the right of the histogram is a larger sampling density than left of center. So, if you over expose a little, you have more information to work with when you post-process. You can recover from underexposure, too, in post-processing, but there's not as much data to use, and I think that's where the noise comes in.....

Somebody correct me if I remembered / learned this incorrectly. It made a lot of things click into place when I heard it explained - though I still have my old film habit when I'm shooting sometimes.

I would probably sacrifice the background birds, and go with a vertical crop....



Amy D.

 

[Lance Peters]

Hi Jeni - Have to say I am at a loss- those birds have such long tails, which doesn't give you a lot of flexability when cropping - unless you deliberatley cut the tails off.

I would add some exposure compensation in your raw software before converting to JPG. Also would do some quick masks on the three sticks that appear to be growing out of the orange flower, also doing the other sticks tthat protrude above the bird on the left.
Then a vertical crop to the two main birds.

Sometimes even though you do everything you can a image just doesn't come out the way you wanted it to, te hardest thing about this hobby is learning when NOT to push the shutter button - **** I have a trillion examples of this LOL

 

[Amy DeStefanis]

Lance - I didn't even see how long the tails were until I read your post! Wow! Right - I guess a vertical crop would chop them off.....

Amy