Weekly Photo Challenge: Layers

Sometimes there is more to a photograph than meets the eye.  In this case, the photo I am posting is actually three photos.  I shot this Bald Eagle using a bracketed exposure so that I could create an HDR image to show as much detail in the bird as possible:

ISO 800 236mm 0ev f/5.6 1/1000

I shot this photo as part of a series of ten images, this particular one is also in my Picfair portfolio.  In order to create these images I rented this 70-300mm lens.  Because I knew I was going to want to get a bracketed exposure I made sure to take along my tripod to help me get as still of an image as possible.  I have written about other birds in this series, most recently about a Peregrine Falcon.  For this photo, I wanted to blur out the background almost completely.  I wanted to use the green to contrast with and bring out the color of the beak and eye.

I took this photo at World Bird Sanctuary at a Camera Day that they were hosting.  This was a great opportunity for me to get a photo like this without any of the bird’s enclosure in the background.  The Bald Eagle is also the national bird of the United States, yet has faced a difficult time here in recent history.  While population numbers for this bird are moving in a positive way, there is still the need for some of them to live in sanctuaries.  While I love to see these birds in the wild, sometimes they are injured, brought to sanctuaries, and then unable to live again in the wild.  Eagles like this one I photographed, work to bring awareness to people of how they can help make sure that this birds thrive in the wild.

The theme this week is layers for the photo challenge at WordPress.  So this is my layered post: 1bird, 3 exposures; 1 post, 6 links.  One photograph, but many things to think about about, what do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit

I will admit to being a creature of habit when it comes to photography.  I like to photograph certain subjects and edit them in certain ways.  I also think that it can be good to try something new.  I think that if you try something and it doesn’t really work out, well then at least you have learned something. I take a lot of photographs of birds, one of my favorite places to go to get these images is the World Bird Sanctuary.  So, my photo for this week’s challenge is of a Bald Eagle:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/4 1/500

What I decided to do differently was in how I did my post-editing.  I had been working this past week on an animated GIF project that turned out fairly well.  What I had never really tried before is saving a single image as a GIF.  So in Photoshop I chose -save for web and then the GIF option in the dialogue box.  What I was going for was a more graphic version of this bird, so instead of saving it using all 256 colors, I choose to save using 32.  Here is the original version so you can see the difference:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/4 1/500

Did it work? in my opinion the answer is both yes and no, what do you think?  I’d love to hear your opinion below.

This post was written in part as a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit.  Check the link to see other interpretaions.

Cheers!

Eagle Taking a Bath

I got these shots with a 50mm lens.  The challenge here was the lighting and the movement of the eagle. With this first shot in particular, it was a question of not being quite close enough, but the water coming off the bird’s head is cool.

ISO 800 50mm f/1.8 1/2000

ISO 800 50mm f/3.2 1/400

ISO 800 50mm f/6.3 1/160

Looking at these photos, I think next time I will try shooting with a lower ISO.

Cheers!

 

 

 

Bald Eagle Lens Comparison

I took some shots of a Bald Eagle using two different lenses.  One is a 50mm f/1.8 and the other is a 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS.  The things that are the same about these photos are that I used a tripod, a white balance card, and am in the same location for both shots. As far as editing, I scaled down both images and that is it.

The best from the 50mm lens:

ISO 100 50mm f/1.8 1/320

From the 28-135mm lens:

ISO 100 135mm f/5.6 1/13

In this case I liked the result from the longer lens.  If I was to keep the photo from the 50mm lens, I would crop the image, but I didn’t in this case because I wanted to show how well that lens blurs the background.

Thoughts?

Cheers!