Advice and C&C please. White Heron

[joe123]

I really like this picture, but the bird's back is overexposed. Is there any way to avoid this when shooting a super white bird? I was using aperature priority when shooting. Thanks for looking!

135mm
F/5
1/320 sec
ISO-100
Center weighted

 

[tirediron]

Hmmm... Options are limited. Images like this are quite difficult because of the exposure latitude present. If the bird was standing completely still (and you had a tripod), you could have taken a series of images at different exposures for an HDR. My preference would have been to spot-meter the white feathers to get that exposure correct, and then deal with the resulting under-exposed background in post.

 

[NateWagner]

Agreed, in this particular case your only real options are to underexpose the background, getting the feathers correct, or doing an HDR.

If you're shooting RAW and you underexpose the background you can tonemap the background to bring it back up a bit, if you want to. You can't really do this with the bird's feathers because once the detail in them is lost it's gone.

By the way, Hey Tirediron, I haven't seen you post on here in quite a while.

 

[tirediron]

Agreed, in this particular case your only real options are to underexpose the background, getting the feathers correct, or doing an HDR.

If you're shooting RAW and you underexpose the background you can tonemap the background to bring it back up a bit, if you want to. You can't really do this with the bird's feathers because once the detail in them is lost it's gone.

By the way, Hey Tirediron, I haven't seen you post on here in quite a while.

Hey Nate, thanks, been busy!