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| Bird Photography 2025 - Page 12 | |
| Another year of feathery captures | Rate Topic |
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29th, 2025 21:52 |
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111th Post |
Bob
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Distance to subject - 70-80m. First chance to photograph a kite with the new lens. Click here to comment on this image. Possibly overexposed....  Click here to comment on this image.
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30th, 2025 09:46 |
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112th Post |
Bob
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The  Click here to comment on this image. shots were taken from the verandah rail in the bottom of this photo - the red dot is where the kite perches.
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30th, 2025 10:40 |
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113th Post |
Iain
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Looking at the distance involved I don't think that is too bad.
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30th, 2025 12:48 |
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114th Post |
chrisbet
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I'd put out some raw chicken and wait for the bird to come closer ... 
____________________ If it is broken it was probably me .... |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30th, 2025 14:58 |
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115th Post |
Eric
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chrisbet wrote:I'd put out some raw chicken and wait for the bird to come closer ... An old work colleague of mine lives in a remote place in the Radnorshire hills. The kites come to his bird table!!!
____________________ Eric |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30th, 2025 16:01 |
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116th Post |
Eric
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Bob …that’s pretty damn good from that distance. It’s an inevitable fact that most digital photographs need some degree of adjustment either in the camera or in software afterwards. The latter is my preference. I grabbed your image from the forum (low resolution so not the best file to work with)….and did a bit of work on it (hope you don’t mind?) Yes the file is a tad over exposed but just moving the exposure will muddy the highlights. Take a look at the histogram. The object is to try to get a perfect curve, centred in the middle but with some black and white …in other words the edge of the curve needs to touch both side walls. The whites… bright sky is burnt out and “climbing the right hand wall” so to speak (yellow) But the blacks are stopping short. (Red)  Click here to comment on this image. Just lifting the Blacks by 16% (blue) brings the picture to life.  Click here to comment on this image. A little bit of sharpening, cropping and framing and this is your photo…  Click here to comment on this image. One of my business maxims was “inside every good photo, is a great image waiting to come out”. And in case you are concerned about having to use expensive complex photo editing software…this was done in 30secs applying the same criteria in photos app on my iPad. It doesn’t take a lot of work to lift the files.  Click here to comment on this image. Yeah …I should have spent another 30sec to tickle contrast and got it even closer.
____________________ Eric |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30th, 2025 20:06 |
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117th Post |
Eric
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After saying how difficult it is to catch Kites swooping for prey, I hunted through my files and came up with the ONLY ONE photo I have ever taken of a kite swooping on prey. Now to achieve this image I was concealed in my car in 30deg heat for about 2 hours. I got through 2 packs of luncheon meat ...not for me, but bait. By the end of it, the kites were either too stuffed to come back or sick and tired of luncheon meat. anyway this was pretty near the end of the luncheon meat. Footnote: I replaced the luncheon meat slice in the image with a dead blackbird ..... ....which I happened to have in my possession at the time.  (Come on.....I couldn't leave a slice of luncheon meat in the frame!!!!!)   Click here to comment on this image.
____________________ Eric |
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| Posted: Sun Aug 31st, 2025 13:39 |
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118th Post |
Bob
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Many thanks for those kind words, and I appreciate your work on the photo which is extremely helpful.Which program do you use? I thought it was overexposed, but all I did in NX Studio was reduce the noise and I think I increased the sharpness slightly. I hadn't thought about the histogram, being obsessed with the focusing. I will address that in future. I have thought of bait - so far I have only had two raptors in the garden - one was a sparrowhawk which broke its neck on the conservatory window, and a peregrine falcon which chased a bird into a shrub - unsuccessfully. It must have stood facing me for at least 30 secs, before it took off, but this was before the Nikon, and the Powershot was not to hand  . I do remember a hawk of some sort flying at hedge height through the garden at very high speed - it had gone before I could blink!I will try the bait - it will be would be interesting to see the result. There's all sorts in my neck of the woods - apart from kites,kestrels,and sparrowhawks, the ravens, crows,jackdaws, would descend wholesale and clear up the bait before the kites got a sniff! Not to mention cats..... I will have to sit and wait, and shoo off the unwanted visitors. Your kite and blackbird is a beaut.
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| Posted: Sun Aug 31st, 2025 15:05 |
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119th Post |
Eric
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Bob wrote:Many thanks for those kind words, and I appreciate your work on the photo which is extremely helpful.Which program do you use? I am Mac based these days (although I still have a windows PC laptop). I use MacBook with a Photoshop monthly subscription for most of my editing but I also use an iPad for quick stuff (like your image) with a free programme called Affinity Photo. In many ways it’s the equal of Photoshop for basic editing but the menus and commands take some getting use to…when you have been weaned and brought up on PHShp. It’s a bit like going to Sony camera menus after years using Nikons. Yes your photo was about 0.8stop over exposed (according to Affinity) but that’s nothing for modern software to resolve. What’s important is understanding why its overexposed…and checking if the camera has a recurring exposure issue. You will recall your early posted photos were set at -0.7 exp compensation. If you didn’t reset the camera when you purchased it and didn’t make that adjustment yourself, it MIGHT be the previous owner found the camera overexposed and set the exp compensation rather than having it checked out? But there’s also the more obvious reason…a lot of dominant backlit foliage around the kite. It maybe that simply the metering system adjusted exposure for the ”majority”. The classic scenario of light subject/dark background….where you need to tell it to concentrate more on the subject. Yes you can make the adjustments in exposure compensation but the other option is to change metering mode from the normal Mattrix (that you are using) to maybe Centre weighted or even (given the size of the bird in the frame) Spot metering. This just tells the camera to stop considering and averaging everything in the frame and consider a central area or spot area only ….to better meter/expose the subject. Appologies if I am running on about something you already know…it’s difficult to gauge/moderate advice remotely. I can’t recall if NX has Levels (basic exposure adjuster) control? That’s all I effectively did with your Kite so it might have been possible in NX. It’s amazing how much sharper images will look by just getting the histogram right first! I believe there are 4 golden rules (someone else will tell me if there’s more lol) to processing your captures. 1) Shoot in uncompressed Raw file format rather than JPEG. This way you capture everything as shot without the camera interfering in what is effectively in old money ….the “film development” 2) Adjust exposure first….Sharpening last (ie only sharpen once you have finished all your other refinements. 3) Save finished master files as uncompressed files NOT jpeg. By all means make a jpeg copy for distribution or display. 4) NEVER open a saved jpeg…work on it some more …and resave it as a jpeg again. Each time you save as a jpeg, the algorithm “throws away” similar tones/colours to compress the file (even on best setting, some is lost). If you open up a jpeg thats already been “pruned”, when you resave it again the algorithm looks for more ”pruning”….and you gradually lose dynamic range. Just opening and resaving without even working on the file, will still systematically degrade an image! Thx about my image….it wasn’t so beaut with a slice of pink luncheon meat drawing the eye.
____________________ Eric |
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| Posted: Sun Aug 31st, 2025 22:15 |
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120th Post |
Bob
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Eric wrote:I am Mac based these days (although I still have a windows PC laptop). I use MacBook with a Photoshop monthly subscription for most of my editing but I also use an iPad for quick stuff (like your image) with a free programme called Affinity Photo. NX studio only works with RAW images as I have learned. I have 2 cards, one for RAW and the other for the jpg files. I did select RAW as the default so I could edit the images - the files are massive! Exposure: on previous advice from yourself, I have been careful to keep an eye on the ISO settings, and any exposure compensation has been kept to zero. The shot was taken just after noon,and as the verandah faces just west of south, the sun was pretty much overhead. I looked at the file data and spot metering was selected. ISO was at 640 so that probably explains the overexposure. Aperture f8, shutter 1/250. What I do remember is that I did not have the lens hood on, although I did have a UV filter fitted.(for what it's worth). I intended to play around with the image in NX Studio, but I was sucked into finding why the Transfer 2 program insists in locating the files from the camera in Onedrive. Good ol' Windows - what a p.i.t.a.- I delete Onedrive , and Windows updates reinstalls the blighter!! I think I have sorted it any way. I still have the .NEF files - I export the images as jpg anyway - which is why you found the resolution low - I think. I play with the images in the .NEF format- most of the tools aren't available for jpg images. I'm looking forward to receiving my Kenko x1.4 converter 
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