[Recovered Thread: 30575]

[discodudette]

Great shot! That would be cool if it was that pairs babies.. it'slike you would be their unle or something.. haha okay forget that Idea... great shot, though!

[geoffs]

zoomn wrote:

geoffs, nope that can't be it.

The bird I posted a shot of is just one week out of the nest box. Just barely learning to fly.

Zoomn, you are correct and I stand corrected. However, with two cheek marks I can't think that they are anything else other than young kestrels. So, why is there such a difference from the norm in the coloration of these two juveniles?

[eric s]

Well, I can think of three reasons.
One could be different age. I don't know how old these are, but I think it's are more than a week old.

Two is that these are females, while your picture is of a male. The female has streaks while the male has spots (like in your picture.) So maybe they are growing into it.

Third is that I might have got the colors wrong. It's very possible I did, but I don't think so. The worse I did was darken that a touch as a side effect of raising the contrast. I do go to great pains to not do that (a landscape friend of mine thinks I'm obsessed about it. To him, you modify the scene to make it look good and sell; "realistic" has nothing to do with it. I know that there is huge amounts of documentation about bird plumages, so I try to make my shots accurate.)

geoffs, I agree about the owl effectiveness. My understanding is that they don't do much (normally.) I'm told that the owner of the porch likes having the kestrels around because there have been no pigeons. And while he hasn't been able to use the porch, they don't mind him being at the door looking at them.

Eric CAN, if you want the RAW file to look at, I can upload it like before (it probably won't do you much good at work.) It just bugged me that some things were much easier, but then I ran into problems I didn't expect.

Eric

[Eric CAN]

Hi Eric and all, I'm back. Had a little misfortune today at work, so I just came in. About your question, hmmm I never seen this happening. Have you ever tried C1 LE (trial 15 days) ? I think after you know the software, its pretty much straight forward to create TIFF that you'll use in PS afterwards. There's 3 aspect of that software where I think outshines others. EC and CC combined, WB (you choose litteraly what you want) and sharpen / soft look which is great to layer a soft look background which kills the noise instantly. It also comes with your camera profile for different task. Manipulation of image are instant, what you see is what you'll get in TIFF.

Give it a try, if you have any question let me know.

About layering overexposed parts by using negative EC, by using layer mask, you can make miracle with that.

Cheers

[eric s]

I just wanted to throw up an other kestrel picture, this time of the father. Hope you enjoy it.



Camera: 10D 600mm + 1.4TC 1/750 f8 400ISO +1EC (or so)
PhotoShop: RAW convert with -exposure, curves, saturation, reduce, sharpen

Eric

[Eric CAN]

Beautiful father indeed. I'm impressed at the details @ 840mm How far away were you ?



Cheers

[eric s]

I was probably around 60 feet or so, maybe a bit more. It was hard to judge because it was on the 3rd floor of the building as well. So that changes things a bit.

The birds didn't look that big by the naked eye. This picture is cropped to around 1300 or so on a side, and then reduced to 800 on the longest side.

Eric

[Normcar]

Great representative photo of the power of that lens (and the photographer of course).