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Inspiring and Supporting Photographers of Australian Birds

Australasian Grebe

Photographed by

Nathan Watson on Sat 14th Dec, 2019 and uploaded on Sun 15th Dec, 2019 .

Resolution

821x1050

Viewed

392

37629

Comment

I went back out to shoot at Lake Seppings yesterday to do some more practice shots and taking on board Ian Wilson's advice, tried to get as low as I could with the surroundings I was working with to shoot this Australasian Grebe. I've also tried to be more restrained in the post production and only made a handful of minimal adjustments to this shot in exposure, highlights, blacks and reduced some noise from shooting at ISO 2000 due to the light. I would have liked to have been able to get closer, but I think it's come up ok. Taken at f/8 and 1/800.

Equipment

Canon EOS 5D MKIII, Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Sports lens

Location

Lake Seppings, Western Australia

Keywords

adult

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Ian Wilson	2019-12-16 21:47:40	Looks really good Nathan. I like the framing very much, portrait format suits this image, the bird is just the right size and well positioned. I can see only three very minor points you might care to think about. The first is the aperture you have selected. The in-focus patch of water around the bird suggests that f/8 is giving you plenty of DoF and therefore you could have used a bit wider aperture for a bit less DoF. This would enable you to get slightly better isolation of the bird from the backgound and slightly better sharpness and contrast from the lens MTF. The second point is also very minor and concerns the white balance, the tail feathers are a bit 'blue' when they should be more neutral white; this is easily corrected in RAW adjustment. And finally, I notice that there is some clipping of the red and blue channels on parts of the bird, for example the eye, cheek and tail. This is not too bad and I only mention it as an example of something to keep an eye on in future. My recollection is that in LR you can use a threshold screen in the 'levels' adjustment window to make the clipped parts visible. Cheers, Ian
Nathan Watson	2019-12-16 22:36:13	--Excellent, it's good to know I'm making progress. I was following Jan Wegener's advice to always shoot at f8 or f11, but I guess thinking about it if you have a busier background it makes sense to shoot at a wider aperture to achieve less DOF. Could you explain the clipping more, I'm not understanding what this means sorry. Thanks again for the helpful feedback Ian.
Nathan Watson	2019-12-17 11:50:20	--Hi Ian, I've done some research overnight and now understand what you mean by "clipping". I've done some minor work to the clipped areas you pointed out and think it's made improvements. I'm pretty happy with the image now and have uploaded it to the New Images gallery. Regards, Nathan
Ian Wilson	2019-12-17 12:08:41	Clipping is said to occur when one or more colour channels reaches the maximum value allowed for the file format. It is also known as saturation and for JPEG format, the maximum value is 255 digital numbers (DN) in the red, green or blue channel. All good photo-editing software provides a facility to enable the RGB values to be revealed. This can be as simple as a readout of the RGB values under your cursor as you roam across the image or it might be more sophisticated enabling you to see the clipped areas using a threshold screen. I am pretty sure LR has this facility; it shows you where in the image the red, green and blue channels have reached or exceeded the maximum allowable value. In LR I think you get the output as a percentage of the saturated value, that is, 100% = 255 DN. We try to avoid clipping because too much can cause a loss of image information making it hard to resolve fine detail. An obvious example of this is blown whites where each of the R, G and B channels is clipped causing loss of detail. Once detail is lost due to clipping it is almost impossible to recover, especially for whites. There are some situations where detail can be recovered when only one colour channel is clipped. This is achieved by clever software that estimates the value of the lost data based on the brightness of surrounding pixels in the colour channels that are not clipped. I have never had much success with this kind of recovery process and just try to avoid over-exposure in the image capture and subsequent image processing. Jan Wegener is a very good photographer but in this case his advice is an over-simplification. As a general rule, you should adjust the aperture to get the depth of field you want for the particular situation. In practice this is easier said than done and is something you need to learn by experience using your gear. I definitely would not get in the habit of using Jan's advice in this regard. If in doubt it is probably OK but with experience you should be more sophisticated with your aperture setting. Cheers, Ian

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	131/283 in Critique Gallery
	4/182 by Nathan Watson
	56/161 of Australasian Grebe
	119/346 of Grebes
	17255/34530 Overall
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