First we start out with a turkey buzzard.Here are my bird silhouette entries for #smap by @nelinoeva
I took these on top of a hill on an overcast day, this tends to cause silhouettes to happen with backlighting from the sky.
Fortunately some of the light bled through his wings.
Here is a bit of a problematic bird to shoot. The indigo bunting with backlighting tends to turn into almost a solid black silhouette even though he is a really bright blue.
He flew off to another branch with more light but the sky also backlit him so his vibrant blue ended up being pretty dark.
Shooting through leaves also tends to end up creating silhouettes. I'm not sure what bird this is, possibly an Eastern Wood-Pewee, I remember hearing it's pewee sound and its wing pattern seems to be correct. Sadly this is a tiny bird that is usually high up in a tree backlit against the sky and I've mostly ended up with silhouettes of them.
Another challenging bird to shoot is any sort of blackbird. This copper headed cowbird is almost a silhouette even though it had direct sunlight on it. You almost have to move the camera to catch the correct sheen of the sunlight on its copper feathers to get a good photo of them.
Here is another challenging tiny bird to shoot against a backlit sky.
This is a common yellow throat after some major adjustments in camera raw format. The problem with camera raw adjustments is the noise that is introduced in the dark areas. Fortunately there is a nice reduce noise feature in camera raw but on drastic adjustments like this you end up with a painterly look to the photo. Thus you have to start creating many layers of the same image masked out for each light and dark region to balance out a mostly silhouetted photo. For a good pose it is worth photoshopping out the light and dark regions.
The buzzard is very impressive.
Honestly I know very little about post-processing, but that last image is so well edited. I wish I could do the same with my photos.
What photo editor do you use? I'll probably do a post on how to edit bird photos in photoshop sometime.
I use a very simple one, an app on the tablet - Photoshop Express.
Yeah I use that one too, the full photoshop has way more features but is a subscription service.
All the pictures you show are amazing.
Thanks for sharing and entertaining.
Thanks its fun loading up the photos to see which ones turned out or not after a day of photography.
I have no more doubts. this makes me want to have a telephoto lens soon.
They are heavy to walk around with but are worth it for all the bird photos.
Woww,, look at the last photo, looks like an insectivorous bird.
Yeah I think its a flycatcher. They aren't too shy either, but they are tiny and fly around alot so it's hard to get a focus on one long enough for a shot.
Of course. Insect-eating birds generally fly everywhere. different from the grain-eating birds. insectivorous birds are more agile.
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Great silhouettes. I'm glad your indigo bunting shots were useful here. As common as they are supposed to be oh, I certainly do not see them very often.
Yeah I hear them all the time but once I finally spot them they are either too high up in the tree or just a silhouette against the bright sky. I know I have a few really clear shots of them somewhere in my archives, just have to dig them up again. I really need to start tagging all my raw photos.