As you might guess by now, I, of course, grabbed my camera and ran outside to try to grab some pictures. Unfortunately, Mr. Badass Hawk didn't stick around. Much disappointment.
While I was outside though, I thought I might as well try to get some pictures of the little birds in my yard. For some reason, a few had decided to stick around. I had my telephoto lens on, so I could really get close up to them, with out making them fly off. It also helped that I was a ninja.
Small birds really really fidgety, they like to move around and not be good subjects. To make matters worse, they were in a tangle of twigs, so autofocus was just not going to happen. Period. Manual it was! Luckily, the telephoto zoom is pretty easy to focus, so once you get in the ball park it's a simple matter of fine tuning it. Actually a lot faster and easier than auto normally is! Who would have thunk?
When composing birds that move fast, one technique is to try to get them in the middle of the frame, so that when you fail they are perfect on one third line or another! Works every time! If they slow down enough to compose, I usually try to put the body on the outside of the frame, lower down, and the head towards the center. This helps balance the picture as it gives the bird some looking space. If the head was toward the edge, it would feel more cramped and have more tension. Sometimes that's great, but not always.
When calculating exposure, I had to think about a couple things. Firstly, it was very bright out with snow. The meter would underexpose the shots (I've talked about this process in a couple of recent posts), so I compensated for that with over exposing by one stop. Secondly, I was in a rush, so I didn't really have time to fiddle with manual exposure. I didn't care about my aperture that much, just that I have a fast enough shutter to get a sharp photo. So I shot in Tv mode with 1/320 locked in, and let the camera set my aperture and ISO. Since it was so bright out, I didn't need to worry that the camera would shoot wide open at a really high ISO. It ended up at ISO500 and f/6.3. Not terrible settings, but not ideal either. What can you do though? That's what settings were needed.
In editing, I used a new technique that I learned about last night! I was watching some youtube tutorials on post processing, and a french photographer had a approach I wanted to try. To start off, he raises the shadows all the way up, and puts the highlights all the way down. This gives a lot of detail. Then, he sets his black and white points by holding down option and adjusting the white and black sliders, just like you do with the threshold adjustment in Ps. I'd forgotten you can do that in Lr! I then added a touch of clarity, just for kicks.
Then, I went into sharpening and noise reduction. I added luminance noise reduction +10, and then sharpened by +90. The french photographers process was to sharpen +100 - the luminance reduction. The results were actually pretty good! Then I held the option key, and adjusted my masking on sharpening to not included the white sky. To do this, you just go until the sky becomes dark. It's pretty self explanatory in the program. I didn't want to sharpen the sky because that would added noise and detail to an area that isn't supposed to have any detail.
Finally, I added a little vignette and converted to b/w. I really like it in b/w, just helps reduce the busyness of the photo in color.
See you tomorrow!
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