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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jekatz" data-source="post: 789582" data-attributes="member: 24415">sletson,I think you've got an excellent shot here.  Like others have said, you got the bird in focus through the branches and managed to maintain proper exposure in the highlights.  I prefer to keep the camera at ISO 100 at all times as I find noise and unusual color blotches to be a problem; I only bump the ISO up if I am documenting a rarity and need a sharp image but detail protection is secondary.  Since the eagle is seated, it appears to be a windless day, and you've still got a shutter speed of 1/500 I don't think you would gain anything by boosting the ISO--you might even lose some options in postprocessing, as any unwanted colors or noise are exaggerated.  As for the -2.0EV, I think you chose wisely.  My own W7 seems to either have metering problems or a problem in the sensor; I find it blows out the highlights far too early and colors in bright areas bloom out into the neighboring dark areas. To prevent this I always underexpose by -0.3 or -0.7 and then if I need to I can bring the exposure up in Photoshop.  I use center metering, center focus, fine image quality, and all other parameters at default (0).  Like Neil I also try to stay between 1.5 and 1.9 zoom to let in as much light as possible.I hope you don't mind me re-posting your image.  If you think your picture is too dark, you can load it into photoshop as I did and gave it a 2 minute processing.  I first tried the adjusting the levels and then the contrast and then the curves, but they all immediately blew the highlights on the top of the head.  A last resort (and usually the best anyway) was to duplicate the background layer, set new layer style to "screen", and reduce opacity of the screen layer to 40%.  A tiny bit of CA popped out around the top of the head so I flattened the image, used the rectangular marqee tool to select just the top of the head and the CA area, copied and pasted it (to make a new layer out of just that area), then went to image>adjustments>hue/saturation and selected cyan from the drop-down menu.  I moved the saturation slider all the way to zero, said OK, flattened the image again and saved it.  For the two minutes spent it moved the exposure a bit closer to 0 EV (which enhances the colors a bit) while maintaining detail in the head feathers; its not a whole lot better than before but it shows that there is some exposure leeway that can be taken advantage of as long as you've got the detail in the highlights.an edit: the screen layer style brightens exposure by 1 stop and I think that a screen layer at 40% opacity represents an EV or about -1.7, so maybe that was the magic number!Nice photo!Jon</blockquote>

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