• Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.

    Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Shooting sacred Ibis? (1 Viewer)

Robotnik123

New member
Can anyone give me some tips for shooting ibis? I find their black heads with white feathers extremely difficult to photograph. Either the head is too dark or the feathers are all blown out. The photo I have below is the best I've taken after many exposures. I have a Fujifilm s7000 digicam by the way. I imagine penguins might pose a similar problem.

45296949.Ibis1.jpg
 
Hi Robotnik123,

A warm welcome to BirdForum from all the Moderators and Admin.

Looks pretty good to me, although, as you say, the white is slightly blown out. I'll leave it to the experts to comment.
 
Robotnik123 said:
Either the head is too dark or the feathers are all blown out.
There really isn't a good solution to this dilemma. Print film (i.e. 35mm color negative film, as opposed to slides) is probably the only way to get enough latitude to get detail in both areas at the same time.

I think you might try focusing on the feathers (which will make the head too dark), and then open up a little. Hopefully you'll then be abe to tweak the head with software to bring out some detail in the too-dark head.

Doing it the other way (letting the feathers get washed out by focusing on the head) is OK, but you'll never be able to get detail out of those feathers, because it just won't be there.
 
Thanks for the tips. I might also go out with my Nikon D70 DSLR next time, that might have better dynamic range than the Fuji s7000.

The bird is an Australian Ibis by the way, Threskiornis molucca, not quite the same bird as those of ancient Eygptian mythology from Africa, but very closely related. In parts of Australia they are very common - I snapped this one in a city park in Sydney.
 
The dynamic range on a typical DSLR (like a D70) is still not going to be adequate to resolve this issue easily. If your camera has a "contrast" or "tone" setting, set it for lower contrast. This will help a little bit. The other thing I suggest is similar to what has already been mentioned, i.e., that you accept some underexposure to maintain the information for the whites, and then you tweak the darker portions of the bird (i.e., the head) using Photoshop or whatever post-processing program you are using. In Photoshop Elements, for example, there is a "fill flash" function that will allow you to add some brightness to the darker tones in an image without affecting the whites. This must be used judiciously, however, to avoid an unnatural look.

When you tweak an image this way, you generally add some "noise" to the final picture, so you should also consider treating the image with noise reduction software as a final step.
 
Try photographing them on a cloudy/rainy day or after sunset so that the highlights in the white feathers are blown out. Neil.
 
You have done a nice job on this photo. With a white bird, you normally expose for the highlights by reducing the exposure, thereby letting in less light. The brighter the sun the more you need to do this. Often if you fail to reduce exposure you get "blown" highlights that are impossible to restore later. The reduction in exposure will lead to a loss of shadow detail, but some of this is recoverable with software. Your photo handles the white nicely, except for a small area at the top where the highlights seem to be blown. Bob
 
Warning! This thread is more than 18 years ago old.
It's likely that no further discussion is required, in which case we recommend starting a new thread. If however you feel your response is required you can still do so.

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top