Post your best bird shots!

[Joel Eade]

I love the pose on the adult flapping it's wings. Nice low angle too. On my monitor it looks like the whites on the breast may be blown a little. Gorgeous bird!

[Kayaker72]

Thanks Joel. It is odd, in that I think you are right and the top half of the breast may be blown out. But LR does not indicate it is blown out (only a very small section of the wing turns red). But I can't pull any detail out of the top half of the breast even with dropping the exposure -5 EV. I am open to suggestions.

[Jonathan Huyer]

I love the loon photo and I'm not sure that the bright white breast is a distraction or problem. But I think that an effective way to avoid it would be to use in-camera exposure compensation when shooting. The same trick applies when taking photos of bald eagles -- if you want detail in the white feathers, dropping the exposure works great. Here's one I did at -1 stop:

[Joel Eade]

Thanks Joel. It is odd, in that I think you are right and the top half of the breast may be blown out. But LR does not indicate it is blown out (only a very small section of the wing turns red). But I can't pull any detail out of the top half of the breast even with dropping the exposure -5 EV. I am open to suggestions.

Try selecting that area and placing the selection on a separate layer (crtl+J) then change the blend mode for that layer to linear burn and adjust the opacity to taste.

[Joel Eade]

I love the loon photo and I'm not sure that the bright white breast is a distraction or problem. But I think that an effective way to avoid it would be to use in-camera exposure compensation when shooting. The same trick applies when taking photos of bald eagles -- if you want detail in the white feathers, dropping the exposure works great. Here's one I did at -1 stop:

Agreed....beautiful Eagle shot too!

[Kayaker72]

Agreed....beautiful Eagle shot too!

+1...and a great example of exposing for detail in the whites. I've tried doing this with egrets, but I have to admit, my "norm" when shooting is to be 2/3 to 1 stop overexposed according to the in camera meter. This tendency of mine probably resulted in the uber white breast on the loon. This particular shot happened too quickly for me to think about my settings, but I was shooting in M mode and the settings were probably set to be a slight overexposure. Thanks for the feedback and thoughts....

[neuroanatomist]

Great loon shots, Brant!

RE the LR highlight alert, it might be inaccurate. Although I don't use LR, I can tell you that DxO's highlight alert seems quite accurate...but their shadow alert misses blacks and lights up bright solid colors (RWB epaulettes, snowy egret lores).

[cls]

A bit OT, but regarding LR highlight warnings I've learned the hard way that they only look at the ProPhoto color space. And a photo without "ProPhoto warnings" can have one or more blown color channels after sRGB export. I've found sRGB softproofing to be a better way to see what LR will generate.

[Watchmen24]

I don't have many bird shots but this is my best...

I call it

Lonesome Dove

[conropl]

Yesterday, when taking some sunrise shots, this Green Heron showed up next to me and start pulling fish out of the lake. So I set up to see if I could catch him in action. This is a collage of 5 shots taken at high speed (8 photos per seconds) with 7D and 100-400 L. (1/400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400, and focal length at 400mm).

Green Heron Fishing by westmichigan, on Flickr