Just Looking

Critiques [Translate]

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• loot (9313)
• [2007-01-27 16:01]
• [2] [+]

Hi Pari

A lovely setting for this photo of the Snowy egret – Egretta thula while it’s standing very attentively next to the waterside, obviously hoping for a little fish or a frog to come by.

I like your composition and POV. The colours seem fine, but the details are rather soft. I think this was probably due to camera movement, because nowhere can I see any real point of focus in the entire photo. I believe the culprit was the very slow shutter speed at 1/30 of a second. It seems like you really pushed your camera due to the soft light you had to deal with at 05h54 in the morning. However one tends to fall in a trap when you deal with such low-light conditions and then you think you would not run into any OE problems, but your photo just proves how easily that can happen especially when you work with a snow-white subject. As a rule of thumb one should always attempt to do your meter reading from the brightest object (unless you’re photographing waterfalls – then you go for average) to ensure there is no OE. In this case you should have done the meter reading on the bird to ensure the exposure there is fine and then you might end up with a darker surrounding, but that would have had the effect of a faster shutter speed and maybe slightly more saturated colours. If there was any area that is still too dark you could have addressed that in PP. Remember an OE area can never be fixed because there is no details due to the burnout, but and UE area can be fixed because it is only dark, but there is still ample details in the darkness that can be adjusted with PP.

A good effort though and TFS.
Regards
Loot