How to get detail in white feathers?

[jaybie]

This is an area of bird photography that I'm struggling with so hopefully somebody will be able to give me some pointers.



I have managed to get a bit of detail into the white feathers on this tufted duck but most of the area is blown. Taken using spot metering and centre focus with Nikon D5000/Sigma 150-500mm OS.

Is this the best I can expect or are there tricks/tips to improve this. I thought about HDR but I think there would be some difficulties with overlaying shots.

Thanks, JohnB

[squishy]

I found Stu's technique to be quite effective:

'Bringing in the whites thread, image editing sub forum'

[jaybie]

Originally Posted by squishy

I found Stu's technique to be quite effective:

'Bringing in the whites thread, image editing sub forum'

Thanks Adam for the link (and Stu for the technique).

I tried it on the tufted duck and it worked to some extent but there is still information missing where I blew the highlights, no coming back from that

JohnB

[momji1971]

Hi John,

Do you have picture controls on your camera? If so try using neutral and drop the sharpness settings down to 0 or 1.

Also turn your 'blinkies' on. Its the setting that shows blown highlights on preview by flashing. This will show you straight away if you need to adjust exposure settings.

And start practising with manual exposure settings. Easiest way is take a reading from the duck (any duck, so long as its in the same light) shoot it at these settings and review. If you have blinkies increase your shutter speed and try again. Or if using App or shut priority adjust + or - compensation as needed.

If you have NX you could process 2 files. One as is, one exposed alot darker (for the whites) and then combine them in your photo program.

You can only recover detail so far though, better light is the real answer! Happy shooting.

Regards.
Stu.

[squishy]

In photos where I need detail in white areas I generally drop the exposure compensation around a 1/3 or more if necessary, and also drop the ISO as low as possible. If you are underexposing and intend to lighten the dark areas (which I find brings more detail than the other way around), noise may be the worst problem, as the dark areas tend to be noisiest. But if you are underexposing anyway, you can tend to get away with lower ISO because you are upping the shutter speed (if you are using aperture priority).

[jaybie]

Thanks again Stu/Adam

I generally shoot in manual so the tips will help. There are plenty of tufted ducks around at the moment to practice on - just need the time

JohnB

[DrNickBurton]

Are you shooting RAW? If so, with that sensor you should be able to pull back about 2/3rds of a stop of highlight detail using a recovery tool in processing. If you shoot Jpeg though, you throw this headroom away.

Another thing to try is Nikon's Active-D Lighting feature (you'll find it in the menus on your D5000 somewhere). This works by slightly underexposing the overall shot, then slightly amplifying the exposure of the darker areas. It's a good option for keeping the highlights under control in high contrast conditions. On the downside, it can introduce a small amount of noise (nothing worth getting overly concerned about though).

Oftentimes (depending on the light), these two measures are enough to avoid losing highlight details. For everything else, dial in a little exposure compensation like mentioned before.

[SteveF48]

I would use bracketing and take as many shots as possible. For example my camera (Samsung GX10) will take up to 5 shots varying the exposure in steps from 0.3 to 2 EVs (exposure values).
If I dialled in 5 steps at 1.0 EV intervals the exposures would be the metered value, then -2, -1, +1 and +2. If the exposures between say 0 and -1 looked best, you could then set the exposure compensation to -0.5 and reduce the interval to 0.3 to refine it further.
As a by-product, if the subject isn't moving, you'd have several images to create a HDR (high dynamic range) picture from. If you shoot RAW with bracketing the possibilities, to quote Eddie Izzard, are endless.

[FungiJohn]

Hi John

It’s always difficult shooting black and white subjects, especially in ‘bright’ light!

I notice from the EXIF data you are using F8 at 1/750. You would probably benefit using F10/F11 at a similar or slower speed and under expose by a good stop.

CS4 should easily allow you to tweak exposure, gamma and highlights too!

Luck is also important and worth checking

John

[Richard G.]

I'd agree wholeheartedly with everyone that blown highlights are bad, but there's an interesting article here on Luminous Landscape about the capabilities of digital sensors and how that should affect how you shoot.

I'm no scientist, which I think would help in understanding the underlying physics of what's described in this article, but I was previously a habitual under exposer and now work harder to get a better exposure in camera and rely less on post processing.