Just back from a 3 days cession which required some steep climbing.
Beautiful birds that can reach a wingspan of almost 3m.
Not too sure about the rendering, as it’s currently being processed on the fly on an uncalibrated screen.
4 Likes
I especially love your 4th photo - so close!!!
What lens did you use?
Wow!!!
Thanx for your comments.
#4 is a crop from the next shot in the burst of #3.
From where I was standing I was able to see them from a distance of about 10 m (yes, hard to reach but nice spot) to 100 m in flight.
The air was “turbulent”; these birds look for updrafts and it’s difficult in these conditions (sun-warmed rocks surrounded by cooler areas created by trees) to get a sharp images with a long focal length.
So 300 mm was a good compromise (and one of my favorite lenses).
Stunning pictures, like @zkarj already said! You use spot-metering? Image #1 benefits very much of the strong contrast between bird and background. On the contrary, did you try to lift up the background of #2 while reducing saturation and contrast? The bird already pops out fabulous in terms of sharpness and the information „trees in background“ wouldn’t disappear if you’d add more brightness to them, maybe?
Thanx.
No. I didn’t metered light. Just did some quick tests starting at common setup in those sun light conditions and checked histograms.
I found a difference of about 4 stops between needed exposure for the top of the birds (#1) and for the bottom (#2, 3, 4, 5). And I shot in full manual mode.
This was one of the hard part, especially when the birds were about eye level and could quickly switch back and forth between top and bottom views depending on their changes in height and bank angle (#5 would have need top view exposure if bird was not banking for example). And changing exposure is not an option (at least for me) when panning in burst mode.
This meant anticipating the trajectory the birds would take. And hope choice was good.
No.
I like the ethereal impression given by the humidity of the air of the shaded areas in this image on the background and the multiple contrasts with the vulture (color - sharpness - contrast).
But as I said above, I haven’t yet been able to check these images on a qualibrated screen, so as things stand, the rendering certainly needs more adjustments.
I think the rendering of all pictures is already very good. My question with the „paler“ background was only out of curiosity if that‘d help the bird to stand out even more or if it would make the image „harder to believe“.
Yes, sounds better. Will try your way.
how is it even possible? So impressive.
Good job. We have them here but I never had the opportunity …
Thanx.
They’re late risers (they wait for the updrafts to kick in before taking off), so it’s not really possible to enjoy the beautiful morning light with them (in flight).