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Finally got around to PP something other than egg shots.

I was up on a property near lismore a week or so ago. I found this kingfisher fishing in a small dam. I sat there a while and was supprised when he landed on a close branch. Had time to get 2 shots.

I think my flash blew away alot of feather detail. Hope his retinas are ok.

Shot with the 70-300G + SB-800 + tripod.

Hi,

very nice capture, like the pose, background, head tilt. It does look like you got a bit too much flash on it You may be able to recover some of it in PP.

I'd still be happy with it myself. I rarely get to see these.

Well done to get them,

cheers,

André

I did the same thing to some poor fairy penguin on during my day on Granite Island in Victor Harbour. I set the flash to 1/128 power, but must have gone wrong somewhere what came out was 1/1 power and no picture. To add insult to injury I set the flash to auto and took another picture before the poor thing regained it's eye sight. I still feel terrible.

interesting pose, but looks over flashed to me by at least 1 stop.
you are looking at existing light to provide most of the light for this sort of thing but adding some flash to bring out feather details.

generally you dial in -EVs on your sb800 I never use more flash than -1ev for this sort of thing. depending on how cooperative this guy was you could try around -2 ev on the flash and increase it a little if required.

using the flashing highlight review screen to look for blown highlights helps but you want the subject looking natural so you need to go less than that even.

when in doubt for this sort of thing it is best to err towards using less flash rather than more flash

Steve

avkomp wrote:generally you dial in -EVs on your sb800 I never use more flash than -1ev for this sort of thing. depending on how cooperative this guy was you could try around -2 ev on the flash and increase it a little if required.

Yep, I usually leave the flash set on -1ev. However, on this occasion I didn't for some reason.