Red-whiskered Bulbul

[Mrudul Godbole]

Photographed this at Hebbal Lake in Bangalore..

Canon 50D,100-400mm lens, 1/250,F 5.6, ISO 200, 400mm

Critiques and comments welcome...

[Sabyasachi Patra]

It is tough to get a clean background when the subject is in dense vegetation. In such situations, it is better to use a narrow aperture(f8 and above if possible) to get more depth of field.

Ofcourse, in this situation your shutter speed was already down to 1/250th second. So increasing it to f8 would have made it 1/125th second. It is tough to handhold and get a sharp image at such shutter speeds using a 400mm lens.

If you could have moved your position a bit to avoid the sky ie. get leaves in the background, then exposure wise it would have been better. You could have placed the bird on the top left rule of third position with space below. That would have helped in minimising the sky.

[Rahul Parekh]

beautiful capture...

[Udai Bisht]

Going through Sabyasachi's comments I have a question. When does the camera's light meter take the reading? When the shutter release is half-pressed, or fully pressed?

What I've learnt in the last few months here is that one has to focus on the eye. In this shot if Mrudul had used Spot metering and focused on the eye by half pressing the shutter release and then moved the camera to place the bird on top left corner, wouldn't the camera's light meter taken the light reading when the shutter release was half-pressed? If so, it would still have read the light off the sky May be I'm missing something here.

Can anyone pls clarify?

[AB Apana]

Nice one Mrudul. Not sure if this is cropped. You could just crop the highlights out.

Udai: spot metering should be done on an area that's 18% grey, if not, you should know the colour variation (from 18%) of the area you are metering from.

Apana