Best Light

[Freako]

What do you Guy's consider to be the best light conditions, seems to me to be either too bright or too dull. Although I am dim when it comes to this game:eek!:
20d & 100-400 L

[stevetb]

Morning and evening light tends to be better as midday sun can be too harsh, so can cause contrast issues and shadows. However, by using exposure compensation (+ to make picture brighter - to make it darker), you shouldnt get pictures too bright or dark.

[cjay]

I prefer overcast conditions and photoshop the rest of the xposure but I do mainly flowers so biased. I agree mid day is to harsh.

This year the weather has been mixed sunny then cloudy in amatter of minutes I set my colour balance to auto in these conditions

[mike from ebbw]

I prefer overcast but bright conditions myself.You get a nice even light with little or no contrast problems and good colour saturation.

[Epsomsalt]

Have to agree with early morning and evening myself. I usually shoot in Raw anyway as this gives you more flexibility to tweak exposure, white balance, colour etc just in case I get it wrong. I have tried the + and - setting on the camera but I never seem to get it right so I just stick with Raw.
Chris

[K-Lex]

Early morning and evening. Produces the nicest warm light. As we have these nice rich blue skies at the moment (at least round here we do) mid-late afternoon works nicely too.

[JohnZ]

It can be just as good if slightly dull but even light. As somebody else said you can then tinker with Photoshop.

[Tannin]

For birds, you mostly want sunlight - not too harsh, not too high overhead, nice direct, low-angled sun. Shade or overcast can be OK, but you just don't get the same vibrant colour and contrast.

Sure, you can tweak stuff up later in Photoshop, and you get exactly that: tweaked-up looking, disposable Photoshop clone shots. 99% of the time, if you don't get the colours looking right in real life, you will not get them looking right with post-processing tricks either.

Post-process to improve on perfection, not to rescue duds. And how do you get perfection? Look around you - you see little bundles of feathered perfection nearly every day. Find some good natural light, and all you have to do is point and click.

Exposure compensation, by the way, has nothing to do with the amount of light available. (The camera self-adjusts for that.) Exposure compensation is there to allow you to deal with the type of lighting situation you have, not the amount of light. For example, with a back-lit subject, you would typically add a little positive EC so that the subject itself is not too dark. Notice that you would do this regardless of the amount of backlighting - doesn't matter if it is candlelight or hot sunlight on a white beach, you'd usually add much the same amount of EC either way.

[JohnZ]

S`pose it depends how much sunlight you get and, up until recently, there has not been a lot in the U.K.

[K-Lex]

All exposure compensation does is determine how the metered tone appears in the final picture. When you meter something (take spot metering as an example), it'll meter a very small area of the frame and the values it will give will render it as a mid tone. If it's a white area it meters, it'll display it as grey. You have to decide when metering, a) what the most important are of the frame is and b) how you want it to look in the image. So, say you had a picture of a swan in the snow - the white is the most important tone - the camera will meter the swan as if it was a mid tone because the camera is a bit thick like that. What the photgrapher has to do is add in some + exposure compensation to keep the camera shutter open a bit longer so more light will come in and the swan records as white.

[Keith Reeder]

Depends to an exent on what I'm shooting.

Winter sanderlings in bright, low sun (especially on my often-dark, coal dust-covered local beaches) are an exposure nightmare - so slightly overcast is best for them.

But I love to photograph (say) stonechats and starlings in bright sunshine, because that makes their colours leap out.

[Tannin]

Good point, Keith. It's the same for me with (for example) egrets, choughs and fairy-wrens - all exposure nightmares and a thin cover of cloud helps settle things down a bit - just so long as it isn't enough to muddy up the colours.