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It's early, even for Minnesota, but we had our first significant snow today. I was working on getting a really good, high detail, image of a male Cardinal in the snow.
Even in a subdued of a snowstorm, I struggled with getting a good exposure with good detail. I got my best results adjusting the exposure compensation I was a little less than 100% pleased.
Any tips?
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The foreground snow isn't really an issue but the bright background makes an image like this very challenging. You did a nice job given the hand you were dealt but ways to deal with this include:
- Under exposing the overall image and then planning on pulling up the detail in the bird in post. Not ideal but with today's high dynamic range cameras it's an option especially if you were able to shoot at a low ISO where you have the most dynamic range to work with. A variation on this is burning down the background in post or heavy use of the highlight recovery tool to bring the bright white areas down a bit. Go too far with this kind of adjustment and the results can look strange but it's sometimes possible to bring down backgrounds and bring up details and colors in your subject in post but it's usually better if you can get pretty close while shooting. FWIW, I pretty much always hit the Highlight recovery slider or highlights in the PS Shadow/Highlights tool when there's snow in an image to help restore detail in the snow and take away some of that brightness.
- Exposing to push the background down a stop or so and then adding flash to light the bird. This is a pretty typical technique for bird photography when dealing with very bright backgrounds and wanting the colors in the bird to pop. It's why you see a lot of Better Beamer and similar flash extenders on bird photographer's cameras so that you can throw enough flash light on birds from a distance. This has it's own tradeoffs including limited shutter speeds for flash synch purposes but is a very common way to deal with a very bright background and a darker foreground bird. This also falls short when there's foreground objects like twigs or leaves that are closer too the camera and flash and either cast hard shadows or catch more light and are overly bright or blown out. So this works best for fairly clean scenes where your main subject is the closest object in the frame.
- Setting up perches in front of better backgrounds and waiting for birds to land on them. This is my preferred approach to dealing with winter bird photography. A bit of snow on the perch can add a lot of interest but bright white backgrounds are tough to deal with so setting up a bit of backyard bird studio with perches in front of darker backgrounds like evergreen trees can help a lot.
Bottom line, bright white backgrounds can be tough to deal with unless it's all white and you can take a studio like whitescreen approach but I try hard to find ways to get subjects in front of darker backgrounds or intentionally underexpose the background and use key flash to light up the subject.
I had a couple of opportunities like yours last winter and yeah, it's a tough situation. I tried a couple of approaches. In the end I went for under exposing and then selectively bringing up the bird in post. Not perfect but seemed the best approach to me. If you can get a little detail in the snow around the bird it counts for a lot in my view.
