First Bird Pictures

[bullyfish]

There is a sparrow that was about 20 feet away from me! If anyone has any suggestions on how we may improve the images, I appreciate the feedback!

[image][/image]

[Steve Foss]

Bully:

Good job getting those images up! Welcome, as well.

I notice the shadows in the sparrow image have no detail. They're solid black, especially the eye/bill and fence area. If you have photoshop, go into curves and fiddle around with the shadows. Nice thing about digital is that, as long as you have the original saved and don't overwrite it, you can always go back to it if you screw up.

I don't know what photo manipulation program you have, but if it's Photoshop, you click and drag down from Image to adjustments, and then to curves. When you get to curves, you'll see that on the graph the black/shadow adjustment area is lower left. So you grab the line toward the lower left and pull it in the direction that lightens the shadow area.

Most image software will allow you to do something like that, even if it's not photoshop. The stuff Canon sent you with the camera should be able to accomplish that though, even as a Canon user myself, I've never bothered with the stuff they send in the box. If you don't have photoshop (the current version runs about $600, a good investment for a pro, not so much for an amateur), look around online for photoshop LE (limited edition), which is a lot cheaper but still provides all the basics you need for good image manipulation.

Next time, you might use the manual setting and overexpose just half a stop or a full stop, which should add detail in the shadows. You have to be careful, of course, not to overexpose so much that the whites or highlights are blown out. With a digital image, when a highlight is blown out through overexposure, there NO DATA to work with, and it'll stay blaze white. Looking at your sparrow image, there are no highlights that would be blown out if you overexposed a stop.

Good to have you here.

[bullyfish]

Thanks Steve!

Your feedback is really appreciated! I have looked at your pictures for months and you are an insipration! Still using an older version of MGI Photosuite...I have a version of Photoshop but have never used it so, I guess I will need to work on that too! Thanks again!

[buzzsaw]

Bullyfish, welcome to FM! nice to have more people posting pictures! Keep them coming, we appreciate your efforts.