Brianr45 Loc: Devon, UK

These 3 shots were taken with the camera set as follows,
f=5.6 ISO=1600 s/s 1/4000 300mm lens. Apart from a crop they are straight from the camera.
Is it possible to improve them and could someone show me what the improvement would look like, please.
If you could talk me through it, I should be very grateful.
I have Picasa available if that is useful.

Georgie Loc: England

Well done for getting the BIF that can be difficult enough on it's own.

I'll leave it to other better qualified people to heop you with the rest though I am pretty certain they will say can you repost at least one so it can be downloaded.

Brianr45 Loc: Devon, UK

Thanks Georgie. I have followed your suggestion. Brian

Brianr45 Loc: Devon, UK

Oooops!!

Georgie Loc: England

Well done - that is the first step and it's right.

naturepics43 Loc: Hocking Co. Ohio - USA

I'm no good with PP but I will suggest that you set exposure compensation to +2 or +3 when taking black colored birds. Try different settings to see which works best for the conditions & your camera. I don't think anything can be done with these pics to adjust exposure in PP since these were taken @ ISO 1600.

bhowdy Loc: Maryville, Tennessee

I am not a post processing expert .... actually I do very little work on my images in post. Just haven't bothered to learn much about post processing.

Couple of questions for you ....... What camera mode were you shooting in? (manual, shutter priority, aperture priority, automatic?) The combination of shutter speed and the high iso are a bit confusing to me. The images show that you had a bright blue sky day, so the iso could have been down to 100 or 200 easily.

Brianr45 Loc: Devon, UK

ISO was set at 1600 mode was Av priority f=5.6 ss 1/4000 camera 550d lens 70-300mm at 300mm.
I've tried to use PP but results are not any better. Perhaps I should choose better parameters at set-up time?
Thanks for trying to help.

birdpix Loc: South East Pennsylvania

This photo has so many things going against it that there is no way to recover it in Post.
1. It is not in focus.
2. The high ISO, in this case, has resulted in a lot of both luminance and chrominance noise.
3. I believe it is a bit over exposed.

Black birds are notoriously difficult to expose for. Using spot metering, the camera light meter would try to make the bird a neutral gray, so you need to reduce exposure to bring it down to a realistic range. Maybe 1 to 1 1/2 stops. Matrix metering may have required additional exposure of 1 - 1/2 stops as the bright sky would have influenced the meter to underexpose for the bird.

Backlighting means that the feathers are not well lit and therefor subtle details are not recorded. Detail in black birds depends on those subtle specular highlights that you only get in near direct light.

The fact that the bird is black and lacks contrast means that auto focus systems are going to have difficulty in focusing, especially with spot focus. Area or matrix focus systems may help if it can pick up an edge to use for focus.

In the example that you have posted, an ISO of 400 would have resulted in a shutter speed of 1/1000 which is more than adequate to stop either subject or camera motion. If you reduced exposure a stop and shot at f/8, you would have avoided shooting wide open with that lens and perhaps had a little sharper image and exposure would have been closer.

Georgie Loc: England

Comments are there to help and we can "ALL" learn a lot from then - Lovely to see the photo and well done . keep going.

Brianr45 Loc: Devon, UK

Thanks for taking so much time to talk me through it. There's much to learn, thank goodness there are such patient tutors as yourself on Uhh to help us learn.