snegron
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 p.1 #24 · Blown Highlights w/D200/300mm | |
jmcfadden wrote:
snegron wrote:
Jammy Straub wrote:
Just a note, if you are shooting your birds in RAW Elan II's advice of lowering the in camera sharpening will have no effect on you final image (especially since your using CS3 which doesn't recognize in camera RAW adjustments)
I'm actually using the older CS2 version. I'm not really sure if CS2 will recognize in-camera RAW settings or not. However, while we are on the topic of Photoshop, would there be any difference between capturing the original image at 2/3 underexposed or underexposing the shot in RAW Capture before opening in Photoshop?
there is a difference between real EV and "massaged EV in post" , the major difference is if you are going to try and recover shadows with a More underexposed Real capture . Really this kind of scene contrast is still very tough in the digital world. I am amazingly getting somestimes 2 stops of Recovery with a D3 raw file, but even with the D3 and its amazing latitude , white birds whose backs are incident to full sun is darn near impossible.
All this mumbo jumbo regarding Underexposing and Blown highlights begs a much larger and more important issue : What is a "correct" exposure ? How would i meter this if?
Personally I would spot meter the brightest part of the birds back and open up 2.3 stops but that's just me, then i would know I was setting the exposure of the BRIGHTEST part of the bird to be 2.3 stops OVER neutral gray 
J
You bring up a very valid point, "what is correct exposure?" While on one hand you are absolutely correct that in order to get accurate exposure of the white birds one needs to meter the birds. On the other hand, while exposing for the birds, we would loose pretty much everything else in the image (background, foreground, etc.) My guess is that those birds were at least 3.5 or more stops brighter than anything else in the picture. It would be just as difficult to bring out the shadows without encountering large amounts of noise. Unfortunately, because there are so many stop differences between the birds and the back ground, and the fact that the birds occupy much less area in the overall scene, getting an average reading by spotting the birds and spotting the backgrounds wouldn't yield a properly exposed image.
Also, the idea is to capture the birds in their natural environment. This is where it gets even trickier. How do we get the same overall lighting and colors that were on scene without either turning all the foilage to dark green (then brought back to the original color but with lack of details and a boatload of noise)? Shooting weddings is much easier than this because, for the most part, the majority of the images taken of the bride in her white dress under the Florida sun show the white area of the dress covering a larger part of the overall image. Therefore, exposing for the dress and (maybe) shooting a fill light for her face is simple. Birds on th other hand only take up small parts of the image.
To get a better idea of what the day actually looked like as I shot the White Ibis shots, here is a sneak picture taken of me by my wife (she finally caved in and started using the Lumix FZ-50). The brightness seen here, color temperature, and have was exactly what it looked like. The image was only recropped/resized for the web, other than that it came straight out of her Lumix FZ-50.
Edited on May 05, 2008 at 03:51 AM
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