pho//blog//raphy

I saw these birds in my backyard tree a couple days ago. So I grabbed my camera and my 70-200 f/2.8 lens so I could go shoot them. I took a few pics from behind them and next to them but I still didn’t have a shot I liked. I moved in front of them and when I raised my camera, they flew away! They saw that I was pointing something at them and got scared!

I thought I had missed my shot but a couple hours later, I looked out the window and saw that they had come back. I went out there again and without rasing my camera, I raised my arms to show them I wasn’t going to hurt them. They seemed fine so I raised my camera and took a few photos. Looking at my display, I saw that the camera wasn’t metering the birds correctly because the sun was behind them. (I wanted to keep the sun behind them because it outlined them nicely from the background.) The camera was metering for the whole picture, so when it saw bright light, it darkened the exposure. I switched the camera to spot metering where it only meters what you have in the exact center of the photo, recomposed and took the picture. Voila! It came out perfectly exposed.

Here is the photo with lots of adjustment layers in Photoshop like levels and curves.