What did I do wrong?

[Sheiky]

Then, your exposure is wrong. f11???? That just underexposes the image and looks like a plain technical error. The Great Egret, which is an all-white bird, looks gray. The bluish sky looks gray.

Brendan you could have chosen your words a bit nicer I think. I also think youve got the wrong idea. He doesn't want to make a silhouette shot like the examples you've posted, but he just wanted the sunset-glow on the egret, which sounds pretty fair to me.


I think this is the kind of idea that he wanted to achieve (the glow on the egret):http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertwalker/1008558015/


Please correct me if I'm wrong.


I think Bardinjw's try at this shot is about the idea what he wanted to achieve. Perhaps even a tiny bit overexposed? You don't really get the glow on there yet, but it also could be due to jpeg quality. With the original I think you could manage to get quite a good photo if you know how to turn some sliders etc.


Normally you would have exposed the bird properly so the white egret looks white etc. , but in this case it's not only the bird he wants to expose, but he also wants to expose a little bit of that sunsetglow onto the white egret. To do that he probably needs to underexpose the white egret just a tad so the sunsetglow gets visible on the bird. And also like mentioned earlier, adjust the white balance so hte glow gets visible. A White Egret in sunset-light doesn't look white, believe me. If I put a blue light on someones face, they also look blue [:P]

The bluish sky looks gray

Yes it does, but from where I come from a blue sky is a gift that isn't always available and the sky looks like this an awful lot of times... [:P] I rented the 7D and 100-400 for an airshow this weekend and the sky was so grey that the 7D wouldn't focus on a plane, because a grey sky and a grey plane made it too difficult for it. I wish I had some more bluish sky that day...

but the idea is to get the bird near the source of the sunset -- the sun!!! Then expose for a silhouette.

Don't get the bird to close to the sun if you don't want fried egret [:P] but yes you're right about the silhouette thing.



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The color turned out really flat and dark, and I added this black border and threw in the fancy name plate to keep it from looking so blahhh (not that it helped a lot).

That fancy nameplate made quite a difference haha I love it!



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I prolly should have dropped the shutter down a little to help out the ISO given the slow speed of the bird but only had the camera for a month at the time and wasn't for sure when things start to blur.

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I hope your photo turns out to be great after all, I can see the potential.


Good luck,


Jan
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