A couple of urban visitors

[Prajwal J Ullal]

ID: Dusky Crag martin?

A very commonly sighted bird in the urban landscape, have regularly spotted these beauties taking rest in the outer area of the lobby, usually in the noon. Though in earlier cases I had documented this behaviour, but wasnt happy with the final result, majorly due to the top down angle, so this time tried framing from the lower floor, to get a better eye contact, and luckily not only it wasnt much bothered on seeing me close to it, but also one of them was keeping a curious eye on my activity. In actual a normally exposed image, editted it to get some 'High key' touch in it.

EXIF:
Canon 550D
Canon 55-250 IS
f/10
Shutterspeed 1/40
ISO400

Handheld, internal flash fired

Location: Kasarvadavli, Thane

[Abhishek Jamalabad]

Nice. The 55-250, although inexpensive, is a very nice lens. This image is an example. Fill-flash at low outputs certainly helps in such conditions, but creates an unnatural catchlight in the eye. Since overexposure was your idea, why not try again by overexposing in-camera?
I'm not good at ID'ing these birds when perched, but they certainly look like martins.

[Prajwal J Ullal]

The shutterspeed tends to the issue, had to bring it down to 1/10th or lower for that high key image, which led to loss in sharpness. The other option would be to increase ISO, which leads to high graining in the image, so preferred this way of editting it later.

[Sandipan Ghosh]

Great find

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Great to see this. How many of them take rest in the area? Any hotel or in the street? Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi