Graham - The fog worked quite well for the mine buildings, good time to shoot that.
Quote: No, i was thinking of the heron standing on a stump in the middle of a hi-key ghostly scene of several stumps. outstanding. Your heron flying along the row of trees is very haunting/surreal. Could you comment on your ideas about toning. I respect the way you make your images very realistic. I often worry about making images so dark that folks won't look at them.
Well, the heron on the stumps picture pretty much made itself, I just picked the subject and the morning to shoot it...
In general, first thing I do is grab a test shot to make sure my exposure will work, and from there just check the monitor occasionally to see if I'm still getting decent exposure. I tend to try and overexpose just a bit too, just a habit I suppose. I don't like underexposing, it's too hard to lighten a picture with a dark blue sky. Darkening one a little is not much of a problem. I try not to overexpose more than one stop or so.
Watch the background, it can make or break a picture but often birds give you very little choice. Sky is tough sometimes, but birds in trees can underexpose very easy since it's all shadows in there. I try to get some sky behind a bird if possible, and in winter that's not hard to do since most of the leaves are gone. I also always try to start at f8, in low light I usually have to go to f5.6 though. I also almost always shoot at ISO 100 or 200, I want the least noise possible even if I get slower shutter speeds.
My favorite time to shoot is on a cloudy day (but not overcast) rather than bright and sunny. Clear days work, but indirect, filtered light is my favorite. Colors come out well and whites don't get blown out easily. Overcast skies make it tough to get the color to come out well, same as in fog. Most of my fog shots look more like black and white but are actually color.
In fog, it's hard to say. I try to get a good exposure and "see" the picture before I take it. It's going to come out mostly colorless, I know that before I start, so I keep that in mind and look for scenery like the stumps out on the lake to give pictures some detail. I haven't had a really good morning lately like the couple of days that started this thread, the fog was so thick I couldn't see more than about 50 feet, no way I could see the same stumps in the heron shot. I was lucky enough to get some egrets on the bank a couple of times. Birds were flying out of nowhere, and no background at all except fog which made it really tough. In a case like that I have to watch the LED screen closely to see what kind of exposure I'm getting and adjust shutter speed accordingly. I almost always try to leave ISO and aperture alone and change just the shutter speed if possible.
Mostly I just try to get a good shot to begin with. I use a K-x with a Vivitar 200mm f3.5 M42 lens most often, very rarely a flash, occasionally a Lentar 135mm f2.8 M42 lens, so it's all manual focus. I do very little editing, the most common thing I do is increase the contrast around 20% to help bring out the colors if necessary, Otherwise it's mostly just crop and resize. I want to see what I can do with my camera, not my software. Get good exposure and focus, and it's a picture...
Post #292 by baro-nite
Similar Threads 
