Egret In Flight

DarkShadow

Birdographer
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I love BIFs. #3 does it for me.
 
Your link is inconsistent in outputting the image.
 
I have no idea what your talking about.
 
Very nicely done! Excellent exposure, and that's hard to do on a pure white bird. Great shots.
 
Thanks Scott. Since you chimed in, may I ask you whats the best way to cut some shadow down on bird from the sun and tips are greatly appreciated.The sun was at my back left shoulder.
 
Thanks Scott. Since you chimed in, may I ask you whats the best way to cut some shadow down on bird from the sun and tips are greatly appreciated.The sun was at my back left shoulder.

In-camera the best you can hope for is not to blow out the highlights and leave enough detail in the shadows that you can pull them back in post-processing, which is exactly what you have done. You are pretty much stuck with the light as-is, a flash usually won't help since the distance is too great and they sure aren't going to wait while you get a reflector in place ;)

There are a couple of ways you can do it in post-processing depending on the shot and what software you use. In this case the darkest areas of the image are the undersides of the birds so just a simple level adjustment of the dark areas should help a lot. In more complicated images where you don't want to lighten all of the dark areas, you can select the areas that you do want to lighten and adjust the brightness and contrast of just those areas. You could probably also dodge selected areas to lighten them up.

Don't go too far though or it won't look natural. It's not hard to make the detail visible but in real life that detail would not be visible. In real life the straight-out-of-camera shot is probably more "Natural" looking.
 
Thanks much appreciated. I have been shooting jpeg lately for birds because I want as much as I can from the buffer and trying to get things right in camera. It is probably safer shooting both but this I think is making me work harder for a decent shot.I also can be dangerous with adjustments.:mrgreen: Other then cropping these are SOOC.
 
Thanks much appreciated. I have been shooting jpeg lately for birds because I want as much as I can from the buffer and trying to get things right in camera. It is probably safer shooting both but this I think is making me work harder for a decent shot.I also can be dangerous with adjustments.:mrgreen: Other then cropping these are SOOC.

Yeah, having buffer space is important. My D7000 has a tiny buffer (for some reason known only to Nikon) and I frequently bang against it shooting birds in flight. I still shoot in RAW though since I don't want to give up the difference in color depth.

Most of us are dangerous with post-processing adjustments, just a fact of life. It's easy to do. The problem is that when editing we see incremental adjustments and don't realize that we went too far. We bump something one way or another and say, "Yeah, that looks better". Then we bump it again. And again. And again. In reality all it needed was the first one and then to be left alone. I've gotten into the habit of leaving my final edits sitting on my computer for a few hours before I post them anywhere. The reason being that when I look at them a few hours later I realize that they didn't really need those two or three extra tweaks. Rather than seeing the incremental changes I see the final edit and sometimes I realize that I went too far with something.
 

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