I Can See it For You Wholesale

I had a good bit of birding at lunch today. In particular, I had some particularly good luck working with goldeneye ducks. These birds are tricky, because their plumage contains very intense contrast. This makes it very difficult to expose them correctly. They also, for some reason, seem extremely prone to chromatic aberration. Partly this is due to the aforementioned contrast, but the CA issues when shooting goldeneyes for some reason are even more annoying than those encountered with other high-contrast birds, like buffleheads. It may be due to their eponymous eyes, which are susceptible to CA in a way that the black eyes of buffleheads are not. The fringing on the eyes diminishes their apparent sharpness in a way that is quite frustrating…

I was able to clean up the CA, for the most part. It helped that I was shooting with the 400mm f/5.6 ED AIS rather than my 300mm f/4.5 non-AI. I shudder to think what the CA would have been like without the ED glass, and the extra reach is essential in having enough image to crop in and sharpen appropriately.

My approach to dealing with CA is generally to drop a control point on the fringing in Capture NX, crank the saturation down, drop some other control points in adjacent areas, and then tweak until it looks right. It works. There are more elegant solutions, I’m sure, but I don’t know that those elegant solutions are up to some of the gonzo CA I occasionally get shooting with my old lenses….

Another stroke of luck — got a couple more shots of the Hooded Merganser x Barrow’s Goldeneye hybrid that drops in from time to time:

CA is even more irritating in this case, because the bird has purple plumage that isn’t all that far from the color of the purple fringing…

So, I finally gave in to the march of progress by buying a 285HV. As you can tell, I’m a bit ambivalent about it. I’ve been reading and re-reading the “Lighting 101″ section in Strobist, and I’ve ordered quite a bit of extra gear (although, as always, cheaping out wherever possible). However, for now I’m just experimenting with the flash itself and whatever modifiers I can cobble together from bits of paper, etc.

For example, this is a plastic bag diffuser:

And this is with the flash working through a couple pieces of curved office paper (you can dimly see the watermark in the reflection):

I’ve also experimented a bit with off-camera fill flash for birding, which is a real pain in the ass without an assistant:

Flickr is weird. I’ve had nine images make it to Explore, and they are pretty gosh darn random. None of them are among my nine best images, and a couple of them are downright awful. The most recent addition falls somewhere in the middle of the range:

There are many ways in which this image could be better; mainly, if I’d had my tripod or monopod with me, I could have gotten a substantially sharper image without having to deal with the risk of oversharpening. I could also do without the off-beige background (the wall of the building where I work). : )

The image succeeds on two levels: one, the composition is good. This was just good fortune for me, although one must also have some kind of eye to see compositional good fortune when it hits you in the face. Two, it contains a hummingbird. Hummingbirds seldom sit still long, so clearly identifiable hummingbirds in pictures have a certain novelty about them, I guess…

But the main thing, I think, that qualifies it to be a good image on flickr, is that it while it has marked flaws when viewed at large size, it makes a really frickin’ awesome thumbnail. Which I can only suppose is why, in like a day of online existnce, it received 225 views and 51 favorites.

The internet is a strange place…