Trogon Photo Tours

July 2020 - This month's article focuses on a morning of bird photography at La Jolla near San Diego, California.  Some of the photography topics I discuss are high key images and bird photography composition.  I was helping out at the NANPA convention as a portfolio reviewer but I managed to get away one morning and spend some time with a couple of friends photographing at La Jolla. 

Peregrine Falcon photographed at La Jolla, California, February 2015.  Canon 7D2, 300F4 1/1250 F6.3, iso 800, Av mode, evaluative metering +1.0, handheld.  At first we looked for and found one of the resident Peregrine Falcons.  It seems to me these birds must be fairly used to humans as she let several of us photograph her for about 10 minutes before flying off.  There was a gray cloud layer offshore but we did have a bit of diffused sun at our backs.  Against this gray sky background you are always going to have to add light if you are shooting in aperture mode with evaluative metering, on a sunny day like this +1.0 is usually about right, while if there was no sun at our backs, more like +2.0 is necessary.  This is quite similar to what the raw file looked like. Compositions of birds which are horizontal in the frame can be a little bit tricky.  This one is somewhat centered, but if I moved the bird to the left, I would be close to cutting off its tail and leave a lot of empty space on the right.  Oftentimes if you want the bird fairly large in the frame it will be somewhat centered if the bird is in a horizontal position looking to the direction where there is more space in the image.  But I didn't compose this with the bird directly in the middle of the frame, there is more space on the right than the left.  Most of the time you want to try and avoid directly centering the bird in the frame.

This is the exact same image as above but processed a bit differently.  The big processing change I made here was to increase the contrast, pulling the levels sliders in both directions to get a whited out sky and make the bird pop more.  I find this rendition more artistic and I prefer it over the more natural version.  

In this take off shot my settings were very similar to the previous shot except I increased my shutter speed a bit to 1/1600 and decreased my f-stop to F5.6 in anticipation of needing more speed for the flight shot.  Honestly 1/1600 is still a little bit slow for these fast flying birds.   In terms of presentation, I left this one pretty much as shot other than the crop. 

Brown Pelican photographed at La Jolla, California.  Canon 7D2, 300F4 1/1000 F6.3, iso 640, Av mode, evaluative metering +1.0, handheld.  One of the big attractions of La Jolla in January and February is that the Brown Pelicans are in breeding plumage showing reddish pouches.  They do head throws to attract females.  I wanted to capture some of these head throws but I found that a fixed lens which with the crop factor was at 480mm was not ideal.  I would have been much better off bringing a zoom lens (back then I didn't have a telephoto zoom other than my 70-200 which I hadn't brought on the trip).  I was much too close when this bird did its head throw so I cropped it tightly to show the texture in the pouch and beak.  With the bird taking up a lot of the frame the image was a bit too bright so I reduced the exposure about half a stop when processing.  

I also photographed some Double-crested Cormorants which were in stunning breeding plumage showing their crests and blue eye and mouth.  The setting for this shot were Canon 7D2, 300F4 1/800 F6.3, Av mode, evaluative metering +1.7, handheld.  For this shot I added more light increasing the exposure compensation from +1.0 to +1.7, the desired effect was to get good detail in the black plumage.  At the same time this blew out the background and created the high key look in camera so I didn't have to increase the contrast during post processing.  This particular bird did several head throws which I photographed.  This shot was featured in the recent book "Pacific Flyways". 

I also liked this head on view of the cormorant, showing the Double-crests well.  I find high key images are viewed very differently by different photographers and photo editors.  There are some people who just love them, in fact 2 of the top BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year top bird photographs in recent history were high key images.  On the other hand one of the better known stock bird photography agencies doesn't even want photographers to submit high key images to them.

Next I turned my attention back to the Brown Pelicans.  The settings for this shot were Canon 7D2, 300F4 1/1250 F6.3, iso 400, Av mode, evaluative metering -0.3, handheld.  I wanted to get some images of pelicans in their nice breeding plumage.  I didn't really like the angle in this shot shooting down on the bird but I could isolate the bird and fit it all in the frame.  Because the background was largely dark blue water and not bright sky I dialed in a bit of negative exposure compensation rather than adding compensation.  This is the full frame, uncropped version.  

This is the same shot as I cropped it.  I left the rule of thirds lines to illustrate the rule of thirds.  The rule of thirds is that it generally results in a pleasing composition if the subject of the image is placed at one of the rule of thirds corners.  That is if 2 equal lines from both vertical and horizontal intersected each other, if you place the subject at one of those four intersections most of the time it will result in a pleasing composition.  Because the bird is large in the frame here I would consider the bird's head and eyes as the main subject.  With a bird small in the frame the whole bird would be the subject.  Our eyes tend to be drawn towards the corners of images and the original image has the pelican a bit too centered which tends to result in a static composition.  On the other hand with many bird photos such as the Peregrine Falcon photo at the top, the rule of thirds doesn't work well if you want the bird to be fairly big in the screen but not crowding the whole image.  



The next interesting bird we found in the area was this Rufous Hummingbird.  The settings for this shot were Canon 7D2, 300F4 1/1600 F6.3, iso 500, Av mode, evaluative metering at +0.7.  When I was reviewing my images from the day for this newsletter this shot caught my eye as a shot that if I turned into a high key image might be an interesting one.  The reason is the various branches going through the frame make for interesting shapes when shown against an all whitish background.  The original was not very interesting because without bringing out the contrast the branches don't show well.  In terms of composition I put the bird in the upper left corner so I could include more branches on the right.  There were no branches on the left so if I put the bird at the rule of thirds corner there would have been too much empty space on the left.  I realize this image may not be to everyone's taste but I thought it made for an interesting bird small in the frame high key image.  

We were able to get a fair bit closer and the sun was out enough to light up the gorget well when the hummingbird turned the right direction.  The settings for this shot were 1/640 F6.3, iso 400, Av mode, evaluative metering +1.3, handheld.  I had realized that the first images of this bird were a bit underexposed so I added lighting to get the exposure correct here and this is very much what the raw file looks like except for the crop.  In terms of composition with verticals I will usually put the birds head fairly high in the frame and often have the bird fairly centered in terms of its horizontal position.