Monthly Archives: April 2016

Photographing House Wrens and A Quick Primer on Light

April 28, 2016Wrensnmckown

Photographing House Wrens

The skies were overcast when the first male House Wren arrived to our yard. He has been dashing from tree to bush, in full view, heartily singing his bubbly rhapsody. Apparently no female has arrived yet because he has not commenced his nesting ritual of building multiple starter homes from which the female will choose.

A Quick Primer on Viewing Light

Since it is often counterproductive to try to enhance and manage natural light with extra light equipment, bird photographers have to be more observant about how light plays on their subjects, and act accordingly. Knowing how to observe light involves understanding the following terminology:

“Highlights” are the brightest part of the photo. They indicate where the light source is the closest and most unobstructed.
“Shadows” are those blocked areas that receive little or no direct light. If shadows are lit, it is from scattered, diffused light reflecting off the highlights.
“Mid tones” often make up the majority of the light and are those tonal areas between the highlights and shadows.

Bright sun creates much more contrast between the lighter and darker parts of your image, and thus makes it much easier to identify the highlights, shadows and mid tones. Diffused light softens the contrasts across the whole image, making for a more even and balanced look.

NOTE: This tonal information is mapped on the camera’s histogram. The shadow areas are on the left side; highlights are on the right, and mid tones are represented in the middle. The histograms for both of these photos show a rich range of mid tones heavily weighted in the center of the graph, with very little activity on the right or left side.

Photo of House Wren — House Wren with the signature Perky Tail.
ISO1600; f/71; 1/640 Second

Pay Attention to the Light

Shadows help bring out dimensionality, texture and perspective. Highlights (from the dominant light source) throw excess, diffused light into recessed shadow areas, uncovering detail. If the light is overly bright on the subject, the edges of the highlights and shadows become sharply defined, creating harsh, unattractive contrast.

Light creates mood, purpose, drama – and thus draws visual interest. Bird photographers pay attention to the intensity and directionality of light, and evaluate how the sun scatters light and cast the highlights, shadows and mid tones. They watch how the light interacts with the shape and size of the subject to determine where to position the camera.

NOTE: On a cloudless day, the sun’s position (orientation and distance) in the sky determines the location, size, shape and length of the shadows.

Softening the Effects of Harsh Light

It’s almost impossible to adequately soften harsh shadows after the image is shot. That said, there are tools you can use to mitigate the effects of glaring, contrasty light.

The Shadow/Highlight Sliders in Post Processing

You can balance the light on your images by using the highlights and shadows sliders in Lightroom. NOTE: It is common to use a heavy hand and overuse the shadow slider; over brightening the shadows and reducing tonal richness. In addition, the more you push that shadow slider, the more likelihood of noise in the shadow areas.

Canon’s Camera-Auto Lighting Optimization – ALO

Auto Lighting Optimization (ALO) is in-camera processing that automatically softens contrasts and restores highlight and shadow detail immediately after the shot is taken. You can choose from 4 settings…”Standard”, “Low”, “Strong” and “Off”.

Ultimately, I prefer to handle the shadow recovery myself in post processing. I leave ALO “Off” for the following reasons:

Camera processing time slows as the camera writes the ALO optimization data to the memory card.
ALO will have an impact on other camera exposure adjustment functions that are engaged, like exposure compensation, flash compensation, automatic exposure bracketing, and others.
ALO will be automatically disabled if Highlight Tone Priority or High Dynamic Range functions are turned On.
ALO settings are reflected in the shape and position of the histogram as well as the highlight alert warnings (Blinkies) in the camera’s preview LCD screen. I like to review this data unencumbered with ALO effects.

The Photographer’s Greatest Challenge

In bird photography, rarely are there assistants available to manage heavy spotlights intended to project light onto your subjects, or scrims to block harsh sunlight, or reflectors to throw back light and fill the shadows. These light enhancing strategies (and the assistants) would most likely backfire and scare away the birds.

Placement of the different types of light affects every feature of your image and is the photographer’s greatest challenge. It pays to be watchful of the light.

To read more about House Wrens and Bird Personalities, press this link.

To read more about histograms and dynamic range, press this link.

Photographing Cattle Egrets – Details in White

April 21, 2016Egretsnmckown

Photographing Cattle Egrets

Cattle Egrets are tropical herons. These images were taken in March, 2016 in Hawaii on the garden island of Kauai where they are found on every golf course, roadside and back yard.

The Cattle Egret is one of the few herons that typically hunts for insects and invertebrates in open grassy areas, fields and marshes, especially where humans keep domesticated grazing livestock. They are often seen following anything big enough to stir up insects, like cattle and farm equipment. Somehow, they still manage to look elegant, even when following a tractor or riding atop a cud chewing cow.

Photo of Cattle Egret — Cattle Egret in Summer Plumage.
ISO320; f/9; 1/1000 second

Proper Exposure of White Subjects

It was early morning and the foraging Cattle Egrets were cautiously keeping their distance from the camera. Just as well. The light meter was reporting a fairly balanced exposure from where I was standing.

When photographing white birds, I try to set exposure to bring out texture and detail in the plumage. During this shoot, the histogram showed lots of dark and light variation because of the wispy golden spring plumage (on the bird’s head, breast, and back), yellow legs, black feet and lots of vibrant green grass. There were no light pixels creeping up the right side of the histogram, indicating that details data in the birds’ feathers would be preserved. (NOTE: Keep those blinkies turned on.)

Canon’s Evaluative Mode

For this shoot, light meter was set to Evaluative Mode and due to the advantageous mix of light and color, exposure was spot on. It is true that modern day in-camera light meters are designed to work best when there’s “normal” and “average” light, but Canon’s Evaluative Mode has been engineered to be smarter than that. It does a fabulous job compensating for extremes in brightness (light and dark) because algorithms built into this metering mode selectively compare and evaluate the scene and give more weight to the active auto focus points. Spot metering would have allow me to take a meter reading right off the bird, but given so much diversity in the scene, it was not necessary.

With photo shoots like this, I rarely have to use exposure compensation (EV) options available to me unless backlighting is an issue, the white bird fills the frame, or a blanket of snow covers the scene.

Nailing Exposure of White Birds

I usually complain about being too far away from the wild birds I photograph. This is one of those times when benefited from NOT getting close to the subject.

The photos shown here are of white birds, but photographing them was not much of a challenge because there was plenty of color and light variety from which to measure accurate exposure. The REAL exposure challenge will come when I am lucky enough to be able to fill my viewfinder frame with a beautiful white feathered bird.

Photographing House Finches Eating Spring Flowers and Noticing Lens Flare

April 14, 2016Finchesnmckown

Photographing House Finches

House Finches are primarily herbivores consuming nutritious foods wherever and whenever they can. It was rather easy to find and photograph House Finches in San Diego engaged in some serious pruning; tearing the base off of flowers and consuming the soft buds, blossoms and nectar from blooming bushes.

Female House Finch — House Finch – Female – Eating A Flower.
Lens flare and Some Reflective Glare potmark the background.
ISO1000; f/6.3; 1/800 Second

Lens Flare Everywhere

Take a good look at the photos of the House Finches above and below. In the first image, the background foliage is potmarked with small polygon shaped, bright white ghost images and some glare. At first I thought that those white spots were a consequence of how the light played in the shadows on the leafy background. Looking closer, it is easy to see that these bright white points of light are indeed lens flare combined with leaf glare.

The second photo below is a less cluttered image because an olive colored wall takes up the majority of the background, but you can still see tiny lens flare orbs in the leafy foliage of the plant.

Photo of Male House Finch — House Finch, Male, Eating Flower Buds.
Lens Flare in barely evident in the
in the Leafy Foliage below the Finch.
ISO1000; f/6.3; 1/800 Second

Sun Flare Sneaking Into the Lens

Lens flare is no more than stray light (usually unintentional and undesirable) sneaking in and bouncing around the inside of a camera lens and leaving on your images an assortment of light specters shaped like the diaphragm of the lens. Lens Flare is almost always a consequence of backlighting coming from within or outside the frame.

These photos were taken with my 300mm L 2.8 IS II lens pointed at the birds, but also toward the sunlight. Despite the multi-coated technology on the lens, the use of an attached lens hood, and my hand blocking extraneous light from coming into the viewfinder cup, the sun’s position and the light’s angle must have been just right to enter the lens (and ultimately reach the sensor) and blast the images with little orbs.

You can see in the second photo that as I repositioned myself and altered the angle of the lens, the intensity of the lens flare became much more subdued. The backlighting at this angle also helped create a soft glow around the bird’s head.

AutoFocus Challenge

Chaotic backlighting can trick the auto focus system, causing the lens to act erratically and incorrectly lock focus. For both of these photos, the backlighting causing the lens flare did not impact auto focus- in part because spot autofocus was set and the camera was able to securely and correctly lock down focus on the bird’s body.

Not Necessarily Operator Error

Flare and glare happen all the time and often goes unnoticed. In this particular shoot, lens flare was widespread within all of my images.

In bird photography, I find lens flare and glare to be unattractive and distracting- an operator error which can be remedied. But it’s a personal preference. Some photographers find it desirable and creatively insert lens flare into their images….either in the field or afterwards in post-processing.

See this post for photos of Eastern Bluebirds subsisting on plant materials during the Michigan winter.

Photographing a Blackpoll Warbler and Thoughts About Monocular Vision

April 7, 2016Warblersnmckown

Warbler Lover

It’s no secret to people who read this blog that my favorite birds to photograph are warblers. These birds present an exhilarating challenge to find and photograph, especially in the spring when their breeding plumage is resplendent and they have reason to display and sing.

The 38+ species of wood warblers who breed in Eastern North America display a wide variety of color and melodic embellishments; and peculiar names. Though a certain warbler species may be difficult to precisely ID without being fairly close (and for me, accompanied by a confirmation photo) the behaviors marking them as warblers are quite consistent. Tiny, (avg 5″ and less than 10 grams) jittery, purposeful, arboreal birds with broad ranging migratory habits, warblers skitter about on the ground or in dense brush and rarely pose on the perfect photo perch.

Photo of Blackpoll Warbler — Blackpoll Warbler
ISO1600; f/4; 1/500 Second

Monocular Vision

When I placed my dominant right eye up to the viewfinder eye cup to photograph this Blackpoll Warbler, my left eye automatically shut, effectively blocking out any other birds that may have been outside the center of my one-eyed gaze.

The most obvious reason my left eye closes is that binocular vision only works when both eyes are working together. It is too disorienting when one eye is looking through a long lens showing a limited field of vision and the other is looking without magnification at a much wider field of view.

So, I keep my left eye closed when photographing birds and have honed my skills at transitioning quickly between binocular vision (with overlapping fields of view) to the one-eyed magnified view I see through the viewfinder.

Through-the-Lens Bird Relocation

It is not uncommon for me to spend many frustrating moments trying to re-find a fast moving warbler that I saw with two eyes, but lost once I peered through the lens. I must direct the lens and quickly re-locate that spot while looking through the much narrower field of view of the lens, all in a highly charged instant. If the warbler is bouncing in and out of the viewfinder, and then gets lost in densely packed undergrowth, there is no choice but to lift my head again until I catch sight of it and am able to redirect the lens.

NOTE: With time and lots of practice, my through-the-lens warbler re-location skills have improved.

Blackpoll Warblers

This female (or immature male) Blackpoll Warbler is a new one for me. She is not as distinctive as the male Blackpoll, with his black cap and white cheeks, but lovely none-the-less. As is often the case, I saw only the less colorful bird in my yard. The females or immatures look very similar to the BayBreasted Warblers. I was lucky enough to see them last Fall as well.

This Blackpoll Warbler stayed less than 5 minutes, looked around at all the commotion the other birds were making, and then decided not to play.

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