Crested/Oriental Honey Buzzard - female

[Prashant Jois]

This is my first sighting and picture of this beautiful bird during early September this year. Hope you guys would like it. Thanks for viewing and please pass on your C&C. It would be great is someone can provide some valuable inputs on shooting against sky as I am finding it bit tricky and need some help to overcome this challenge. Exif details below -

Body - 7D
Lend - 100-400
Shutter speed - 1/200
Aperture value - 9 (in aperture priority)
Metering mode - center-weighted
Exposure compensation - +1
ISO - 100
Focal length - 400mm

During post processing recovered shadow and highlight by 20% and other normal stuff like (adjusting levels, sharpness)

[Tapas Chattopadhyay]

Superb shot.....

[Mrudul Godbole]

The head turn and the eye contact is nice. Usually while photographing against the sky, it is better to dial in a +ve exposure as the subject gets underexposed when the background is bright. The composition is nice. Thanks for sharing.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Prashant,

A few points to remember.

Shutter speed is important as that impacts the sharpness. You need to find out your comfort level so that you know the minimum shutter speed that you can use and get sharp shots (when no one else is rocking the boat/gypsy).

I would increase the ISO to 200 or 400 to get the desired shutter speed. In this case, ISO 200 would have given you 1/400 shutter speed and would have been much better.

Centre weighted metering and off centre composition?

If you are cropping heavily, then using centre-weighted metering for a subject at the centre makes sense and later one can recompose by cropping.

Else, I would suggest evaluative. The best is manual metering.

To know more about metering you can check this tutorial: Indiawilds: Land of the Tiger. Conservation, Wildlife Photography, Communities (http://www.indiawilds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1970)

However, it is a bit advanced. So to start with you can use evaluative and give exposure compensation of 2/3 or 1 stop depending on how small the bird is in the frame. Check the histogram to see the blinking highlights which will indicate if there is overexposure.

In the present case, I agree with the composition. The bird looks like cut and paste in the frame ie. the edges are sharply delineated giving such an impression. It can happen in against the light/sky conditions when you pull up shadows a lot or when you play with various layers in photoshop.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Tapas Chattopadhyay]

Awesome detailed guidelines Mr. Patra....I am sure that I am in a right forum...

[Prashant Jois]

Thanks a lot Sabyasachiji for provide such details insights. I am glad that I did the right thing by joining this forum. Hope to learn more from you other experts.

Thanks again,
-Prashant.

[Supreet Sahoo]

Prashant welcome to IW's. You will actually be glad to join this place as there is so much to learn here. Agree on all the comments made by Mrudul and Sabyasachi sir below. By how much was this cropped ? Also did you try out different EC values to check the kind of details lost/saved? In wildlife photography it helps to have an image without distracting borders (ofcourse sometimes it really adds to the image ) -

Ex - <https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=136535566379342&set=a.100259916673574.351.100000686975450&type=3&theater>

Check the images to the left to compare the impact. This is just an opinion though as you can still add it. :001_smile:

Another small question - Is this in Hesserghatta ?

Welcome to Indiawilds
Supreet :001_smile:

[Prashant Jois]

Prashant welcome to IW's. You will actually be glad to join this place as there is so much to learn here. Agree on all the comments made by Mrudul and Sabyasachi sir below. By how much was this cropped ? Also did you try out different EC values to check the kind of details lost/saved? In wildlife photography it helps to have an image without distracting borders (ofcourse sometimes it really adds to the image ) -

Ex - <https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=136535566379342&set=a.100259916673574.351.100000686975450&type=3&theater>

Check the images to the left to compare the impact. This is just an opinion though as you can still add it. :001_smile:

Another small question - Is this in Hesserghatta ?

Welcome to Indiawilds
Supreet :001_smile:

Supreet,

Thanks much for your inputs. It's kind of hard to say how much the image was cropped but for sure this is a heavily cropped. Since it would be too difficult to get close to these raptors you would end up getting lot of space around the subject unless you have a 500 plus prime. Yes, I did try with various EC options ranging from +1/3 till +1 and this was the best in terms of subject details compared to others others were relatively dark in terms of subject and BG was blueish than this. Since we were handheld shots, i thought merging two images would not help.

The below link is not working for me. Could you please check it? Yes, this is shot in Hessarghatta.

Thanks again,
-Prashant.

[Atul Sinai]

Prashant, good to know that you are glad to join this forum.

Nice eye contact. The head turn adds more value to the image.

Always check the images for quality at 100%. You'll get an idea about camera shake, focus etc. Sharpening during post processing can produces artifacts and takes away the natural feel of the image, so always better to get sharp images straight out of camera.

As it is a crop, you can have more space all around.

Thanks for sharing.

Regards,
Atul