What do you think of this photo

[vinnychameleon]

Hi guys I am new to wildlife photography and took a few photos with the Panasonic FZ7 I got from santa here they are what do you think.

[nightshade]

Hello and welcome,I hate criticising but you will improve in leaps and bounds now you have joined us

[glsammy]

With your first shot, your camera has metered for the brighter sky and not the bird, hence the bird and feeder is in shadow. when shooting like this, you need to either set your metering to centre or spot, or apply some positive exposure compensation, i.e. slow down the shutter speed, to make sure the main subject is clearer.
Did you shoot in auto mode? if you did, you'd be best to set it to aperture priority, usually marked as AV or AP on the dial.
Try a simple test. Point the camera to a background of trees or other neutral background colour and check what shutter speed the camera is suggesting. Then point it towards the sky, you'll see that even on a dull day the shutter speed will shoot upwards! That's what exposure compensation is for.
You can see the difference yourself in your second shot, which doesn't have much sky in it, the camera has metered correctly, and you can see the bird clearly.

[Billy Wobble Dagger]

The second picture looks really good, the first is a bit dark. How far away is the subject from you? I've been thinking about buying a Panasonic FZ7 for a while now mainly because of the good zoom.

[Ollie]

Originally Posted by glsammy

With your first shot, your camera has metered for the brighter sky and not the bird, hence the bird and feeder is in shadow. when shooting like this, you need to either set your metering to centre or spot, or apply some positive exposure compensation, i.e. slow down the shutter speed, to make sure the main subject is clearer.
Did you shoot in auto mode? if you did, you'd be best to set it to aperture priority, usually marked as AV or AP on the dial.
Try a simple test. Point the camera to a background of trees or other neutral background colour and check what shutter speed the camera is suggesting. Then point it towards the sky, you'll see that even on a dull day the shutter speed will shoot upwards! That's what exposure compensation is for.
You can see the difference yourself in your second shot, which doesn't have much sky in it, the camera has metered correctly, and you can see the bird clearly.

Graham is spot on with the advice given. I am the worlds worst for forgetting to alter the exposure compensation for shots like your first one. Nice first efforts though keep it up and practice, practice, practice is the way to go, it doesn't cost anything only time with digital

Roger

[eeyore]

apart from your exposure (graham being spot on here) , you could also have done with moving to your right (- or moving the feeder, or pruning the tree) so that you dont have twigs across the image -it might also have benefited from a crop to focus the eye on the bird.

that said , they are considerably better than my first efforts (way back in the mists of time) and i have no doubt you will improve with practice

it is also worth remembering that you can improve under exposed shots in an image editor as i have done with your top shot here ( I used PSE5) only taking a couple of minuites - however it would be much harder to do something about that twig accross the front

[glsammy]

Here it is with some of the branches removed.. I don't often do as much as this, so forgive me if it's not too hot!

[Garden Carpet]

Gslamy, how do you do that? I tried to remove some barbed wire from a shot and couldn't 'replace' the background properly.
jaki

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by Garden Carpet

Gslamy, how do you do that? I tried to remove some barbed wire from a shot and couldn't 'replace' the background properly.
jaki

clone tool or healing brush - set to a fairly small pixel size - it is easier on clean backgrounds such as the sky , as you can see on the nuts in grahams pic it is a so and so with regular patterned backgrounds.

as a long term solution a pair of secateurs would be a lot less hassle

[glsammy]

Originally Posted by Garden Carpet

Gslamy, how do you do that? I tried to remove some barbed wire from a shot and couldn't 'replace' the background properly.
jaki

The clone tool jaki. If you look carefully, you'll see I didn't get the spacing right!
I could get it better with a bit more time, I only took a couple of minutes on this one, as I was only trying to show what type of thing can be done.