Minolta 600si with shoulder brace, Tamron 200-400 lens, Wellfleet, MA.

-- Ross Warner (ross.warner@East.sun.com), October 21, 1998

Answers

Ignoring the digital compression artifacts in the sky region, it's a pretty nice shot except for the exposure. The bird is way underexposed, probably because the camera biased the reading for a neutral grey sky. You should have opened up a stop or two for the bird.

-- Bob Atkins (bobatkins@hotmail.com), October 21, 1998.

Bob,

You're right, the original photo (as returned by a 1-hour lab) was actually much darker than this. The heron was a silhouette, which I thought was effective, actually.

When I scanned the negative, it came out lighter than the lab print without adjustment. I found that there actually was a lot of detail in the bird, and a good print shows it well.

I didn't want to make the bird any lighter than this, although I was able do so in Photoshop and experimented with that. To make the whole picture lighter would take away the sky color. It was late afternoon, and the sky actually looked something like this.

-Ross

-- Ross Warner (ross.warner@East.sun.com), October 21, 1998.

Here's the perfect situation to use fill flash, if you could figure out how to set the flash exposure or your camera could. You could have gotten good light on the bird to bring out details and held the sky color.

Nice pose for difficult shot.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), October 21, 1998.