White birds

[bill jolley]

Have,nt a clue what birds they are Not my strong point

[kevinj]

They are Great Egrets,easy to tell from other Egrets because of the Kink in their neck.Not easy to capture as it is easy to blow the whites out.

[P Plates]

Nice shots. Their feathers look thicker than the ones up this way, I wonder if birds grow more or maybe moult less in the cooler climates.

[sejac]

Bill, I notice you are using Photoshop 7 for editing. A man after my own heart! So do I, but mainly for cloning, or stiching a pano together. Then again, I still use Word 2002 as well!!

If you had Lightroom, you could easily bring down the highlights and/or whites, thereby increasing the feather detail. Very tricky with white birds to get it right.

You can download a free 1 month trial of Lightroom from Adobe. There is a learning curve with LR as it does work differently to PS. But in my opinion, 'differently' is better, and it is very efficient and easy to use once you have overcome the differences. It's not expensive to buy either compared to PS.

[Alan]

Hi Bill,

Agree with Kevin's ID.

Looks like you got very close to this one - well done.

Exposure looks pretty good, but I'm on an old monitor atm. But you may want to consider using the blinkies' feature' on the LCD back screen (if you have it?). It will show you if you have blown the high lights and you can adjust the exposure accordingly with the +/- button

Shooting in RAW will also give you more leeway in adjusting the exposure in PP - if PS6 allows it?

I'd also suggest you try using a wider aperture than the f/11 and f/13 you used here. I set my camera to Aperture Priority and set the aperture to f/7.1 (or 8).. This has two benefits. It isolates the subject from the background better and also allows you to use a higher shutter speed which means easier hand holding or freezing bird motion better. Increasing the ISO will also give you more room to play with shutter speed and aperture (I notice you used 200 ISO, which is fine for the bright light you had here)

Having the bird at eye level is also something to strive for.

A lot of people swear by Lightroom - but I still like my Photoshop.

Be careful with bird photography - it can become addictive quickly, and then it's a very expensive, slippery slope to obsession and the invention of new swear words

Cheers

oh - I was also going to suggest limiting the height of your vertical photos to 800/900 pixels (as is your #1). Your second one is 1085, and even on my large monitor I still have to scroll to see it all

[sejac]

Wise words Alan. Some excellent advice here.

[bill jolley]

Thanks for the words of wisdom Yes I do use ps 7' but have also got elements 10 ,combined these suit may needs at the moment , perhaps one I will update