The story
We were sitting on the back deck watching the birds at the feeder and generally enjoying a nice day in early May. I think it was my daughter who noticed a bird circling in the distance over the neighborhood pond. At that distance, trying to ID a large whitish bird flying over a pond, I fell back on my previous experience and said it was either a gull or a tern, both of which I’d seen fishing there in previous years. I was more interested in looking at a yellow bird that looked a bit different from the goldfinches we were used to.
However, the sun was warm and the company was good, so I didn’t immediately go in for a camera with a long lens to get a better look at the small bird. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me, and my daughter was getting bored, so I went for my camera. Of course, when I came back, there was no sign of the little yellow guy.
Looking around for something else to justify the fact that I was carrying enough equipment to qualify for weight training, I saw the large white bird again, but it kept disappearing behind the trees in our yard. So I hopped the fence and walked down a ways to get a clear view. With a 600mm telephoto to help out, I soon realized that this was not a gull with a desperate need for a pedicure, but some kind of bird of prey that I hadn’t seen before.
I started taking bursts of photos whenever I was able to get the bird centered on the focussing points, and concentrated on trying to follow the bird’s path to increase my chances of staying in focus. This was made a bit easier as the bird would sometimes almost stop in mid-air while looking down. At this point I still hadn’t put all the clues together and come to the conclusion that this was a fish-hunting bird.
That became quite obvious when it suddenly literally dropped out of sight. By the time I found it again, there was a fish in its talons. Later I found I had a couple of blurred images, but I was kicking myself that I hadn’t anticipated its dive.
After a couple of victory laps around the pond, the bird and its prey (quite a decent sized fish – I was surprised) flew off. Back at my computer, I was able to confirm that this was an Osprey.
In four or five minutes taking photographs I captured 95 images, usually in bursts of 5 to 8 shots each. What was surprizing was the keep ratio: 28 shots were keepers, and 18 made it to this post. Usually I consider 5 to 10% keepers to be pretty good for this type of photography, so anytime another Osprey wants to come by, I’d be happy to open a can of tuna to say thank you!
If you’re on a large screen, it’s well worth clicking on any one photo as a starting point and then scrolling through with full-sized photos.
For those who are interested in this sort of thing, I have added some technical details of the photography and post processing after the photo gallery, including details of attempting to turn the sky bluish on one image, when it really was a pretty grey sky.
Technical Details
Photography
I used a Sigma 150-600mm on my crop sensor Nikon DSLR. The EXIF details are shown on each photo near the bottom of the screen once you click on an image to magnify it. I always shoot RAW, not JPG. Mostly they were taken at 1/2000 sec in shutter priority which resulted in maximum apertures (f6.3 or so). Matrix metering, group focussing area. High continuous shutter bursts. I have back button focussing set up on all my cameras, and in this situation, if the bird is in the screen, I’m hitting the focus button, and meanwhile, I’m trying to keep the bird in the focus area, which I set in the centre of the frame. Most of the time, I know I’ll be cropping, so I can adjust the composition later, and centre works for me. Whenever I get the bird in the focus area, I’m capturing images.
I’ve read that when taking photographs of white birds I should compensate with an exposure adjustment so I don’t overexpose the feathers. Well, firstly, I didn’t think of that, and secondly with matrix metering there was so much sky that my birds are all underexposed anyway. I should try centre-weighted or spot exposure. Maybe.
Post processing
I use ACDSee Photo studio Ultimate 2022 for all my camera images. First I cull the total misses and badly out-of-focus shots and see what I have. If there a lots of a particular type of shot (soaring, braking, has a fish for instance) I can cull some more and perhaps eliminate shots with part of a wing out of the frame. After that, perhaps I’ll eliminate ones where the head is obscured. You get the idea. Reduce to the best.
I usually do a rough crop before I adjust exposure, just so I can see what I’m doing.
To tackle the problem of the Osprey being underexposed, I start with Light EQ and brighten the white feathers lots and darken the brown a bit. On some, I tried darkening the sky to see if I can coax some colour out of the grey, but often that affected the bird as well.
The first time I processed these images, I went a bit crazy with sharpening and clarity and probably went too far with Light EQ as well. The images began to develop a halo around them. For this final edit I backed right off and started over. Once I had a decent starting point, I copied and pasted the results of my test image processing to all of the other similar images, and then went through each one to micro-adjust and fix the crop if necessary. On this round I made small changes to overall exposure, Light EQ if necessary, and especially Tone curves to ensure I was using the full tonal range before conversion to JPG.
On one shot you can see I put some colour in the sky. I did this with the colour wheel. I used the dropper to sample the sky, adjusted so none of the bird was affected, and then raised the saturation. I wasn’t super impressed! I suspect there is so little colour information present in these photos that any attempt to mess with it is doomed to fail. I suppose I could do a sky replacement, but I chose not to. Even with the equivalent of a 900mm lens, the resulting images only have enough resolution for a 5×7 print. Fine for social media, but we’re not going to be putting any of these in picture frames, so further messing around would be a mistake, I’m thinking.
The final steps were selecting the 4s and 5s and then a batch export to final dimensions and conversion to jpg for the website.
I’m super happy with these results. Hope you enjoyed them.
