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Taken yesterday while at the Western Treatment Plant ("Werribee Sewage Farm") with Kipper...



This was taken with my EOS 30D: yesterday was the first real wildlife exercise it's had. I'm still waiting for Adobe to provide Camera Raw support for the 30D, so the above image was processed with Canon's DPP (grumble, grumble).
The 30D really showed its value with flight shots, tracking the focus a bit more easily than the 20D (which was already pretty good).

Mind you, the lighting was a bit tricky. Here's a Black Kite checking us out...

Really like the first one. Push me pull you of the bird world. Just excellent.

Both are great images and very well taken. The first one is quite unusual and interesting. I like their bent beaks, it really adds to the great posing they have done for you

Love the first one, two birds on one pair of legs. Great capture The halo on the second is a little disconcerting, maybe too much sharpening?

Looks good Dave

Oneputt there is no haloing on the second photo. That is purely due to the position of the sun shining through the tips of the feathers from behind - backlighting. It's on all of my shots aswell when shooting the bird at that angle.

Dave, your exposure is a bit too long on the first as the whites are blown - loss of feather/plumage detail. Great shots though

Dave,

First one is great

What's the grumble with DPP? It's my editor of choice; I only use PS for sharpening and resizing.

A lot of pros hate it and tend to use Adobe CS/CS2 and CameraRaw from what I've heard on other forums.

Dave, the first is a tremendous shot, it must have taken some time to get that pose.


When I saw the title red necked, I thought they might be driving a pick up truck with shotguns on the rear window

We were at Borrow Pits for 2.5hours so we were there a while

kipper wrote:Dave, your exposure is a bit too long on the first as the whites are blown - loss of feather/plumage detail.

On closer examination, you're right: the red channel is clipped in a couple of places in that white. But only just - I could have shot 1/3-stop lower and caught it, but it's just on the border line. In fact this is somewhere I would blame DPP: it's not quite that "hot" in the DPP preview!

I'm sure part of my issue with DPP is lack of familiarity: it works in a quite different manner to my normal workflow. But I'm sure that's not the only explanation.
For example it doesn't have the Exposure/Shadow/Brightness controls of ACR, instead having a Brightness control (you can play with the curve, but it won't for example give control over the highlight areas.
I can't select a group of images and use click-WB to set the WB for all of them: I have to work on one, save the WB as a preset, then apply that to each of the others.
I can't call out to DPP from my cataloging software on an individual image or a group: it wants to browse a whole folder.
When I convert an image into Photoshop it is assigned a random name, losing the original name (which is a pain when I save the PSD).
There's more, but I won't bore you with the details....

I'll be happy when ACR 3.4 comes out and I can calibrate it for my 30D's colours. In the meantime I can take lots of great photos with the camera, but not necessarily get the best out of the RAW files.

Worth the time Kipper for your results, and thats without including your shots

Dave's are as good as mine. I didn't have the best day out photography wise, but had a great day out spotting wise. Saw a few birds that I've never seen before so I was happy. The thing that was annoying me the most about the avocets was everytime I tried to photograph them they'd have grass/reeds in the background and given the color of the foliage it sort of didn't give a clear seperation of the head. I was trying to get a nice shot of them with a relection in the water. Didn't work though. They're also very wary of people and tended not to come even close to me

Thats an awesome shot of the birds!almost looks like one with two heads

kipper wrote:The thing that was annoying me the most about the avocets was everytime I tried to photograph them they'd have grass/reeds in the background and given the color of the foliage it sort of didn't give a clear seperation of the head. I was trying to get a nice shot of them with a relection in the water. Didn't work though.

That's what you get for crawling off along the shoreline.
While shooting across the water can provide good perspectives, this is one example of a time when staying a bit higher to get a clean background works too...

And sitting in one spot for a long time did let the birds come in relatively close.

DaveB wrote:
And sitting in one spot for a long time did let the birds come in relatively close.

Same as hunting and preying chic

Dave,
Great works btw, thanks for sharing.