Some Seagulls

[Cathus]

from a visit to the North Norfolk coast today.

Shot with a Canon 1D MkIV & 100-400L

1.


2.


3.


4.

[MattUK]

Nice shots - you've managed go get a little background in a couple of them, so it's not just "bird on blue"! A could of them feel a tad over-exposed though? I remember reading about shooting stuff against bright blue sky, and the suggestion was to under expose by about .7 I believe...

Looks like it was a great day

[Cathus]

Cheers Matt,

Funnily enough, I had a bit of a schoolboy error on this trip. I got out both cameras before I went. I was going to take the 5D MkII as I generally use this for most non-sports stuff, so I changed it from jpg to RAW (I was using both cameras last week for sports).

I got my gear together & at the last minute decided to take the 1D MkIV instead, but forgot to change it to RAW. So I don't have the same latitude to adjust.

I found it quite difficult to expose for these birds because they have black heads (well very dark brown) & white bodies & the sun was high in the sky with no cloud.
In the full size shots you can still see the individual feathers in the tail in shot 4 which is the one that looks most overexposed.

They were actually shot with + 1/3 or 2/3 stop to keep the whites bright & detail in the head & beak.

Out of interest, here are the histograms for 1,2 & 4 in order:



and here's a crop of an unprocessed section of 4



black head against white body in bright sun = nightmare!

[OldBoy]

Four cracking shots.

With the D3 I usually set it to -3 and spot and sometimes -7 if it's really bright. Then use curves to make final adjustments.

[karenoliver]

Great shots, Garry. Hard to expose for as the heads are black but I think you captured detail in the highlights and shadows really well.

Karen

[MattUK]

I take it all back Cathus - seems like you did an excellent job with difficult conditions

[Cathus]

Thanks Matt, just thought it might be interesting to show my thinking on how I took the shots.