June 8, 2024 – Birds as Poetry —— Just because I WANDER

Sounds ominous doesn’t it. (Part #01). What started off as a quick small post, rapidly grew to be a treatise, and despite the best editing efforts, it still seemed to loom somewhere between “Romeo and Juliet” and “War and Peace”.

Easy squeezy. We’ll have a couple of them.

Ever since the days when Nicéphore Niépce made the first photograph, back in 1826, (and as it turns there is all sorts of disputes about who, when, where, but—Nicéphore is still my man!) exposure has been a hot topic for photographers.
Poor old Nicéphore had to expose his image for about 8 Hours. (no record that I can find tells of the f/stop used). Here is an interesting link to view the result.
I guess the one thing he didn’t have trouble with was getting shadow detail, as the sun moved over the buildings the shadows were bathed in sunlight at some point. How easy is that.
It should also be noted, and I’m sure it’s obvious, Nicéphore did not make bird inflight his first experiment. 🙂

Since then the conversations have always been, “So what exposure settings do you use?” In the forlorn hope of finding just the right way to make every exposure perfect.

A couple of emails from a blog I follow, by Tony Whitehead from New Zealand touched on the subject in some detail, so I’l not clutter up the web by repeating it.

See here for How Crucial is it to get Correct Exposure
And Maximising Dynamic Range for Backlit Subjects

For those that follow the “Expose to the Right” ETTR model, Tony’s explanations are about as succinct as you can get.

The concept of ETTR was first brought to light (pun intended) by Thomas Knoll, (he of the creator of Photoshop and Camera Raw decoder), and Michael Reichmann (the creator/owner of Luminous Landscapers website) while they were on a photo-tour of Iceland in 2003 Interested? See here.
The concept as Tony outlines is that about half of the exposure detail is in the brightest stop on the righthand side of the histogram —Please bear in mind that when Thomas and Michael built this model, most digital cameras had at best about a 5 stop dynamic range.

Fast forward to the present, and we find people making images that seem almost to the point of overexposed and then sliding sliders in the White, and Highlight ares of their chosen software package to bring back the details in those white areas of the subject. In my case, the bird.

And now that AI is being built into products such as Topaz Photo AI and DXO Photolab and their PureRaw, and more recently from Gentleman Coders, Nitro. the need for ‘correct exposure’ is going to become a very “Fuzzy” (computer speak there), term.

The one thing that does, however need to be remembered is no matter how clever the software, no matter how many sliders, or layers are used, nor how the exposure was determined, the one constant in all this,

Is,
How much light was falling on the subject at the time of the exposure.
As Engineer Scotty, says to Captain Kirk of the Enterprise, in the TV series, “Starwars”, “Ye cannae change the laws of physics Jim!”

Which seems like a good time to move on to the photo of the week. 🙂

This pair are back together again. He had been waiting patiently for about 6 weeks or more, as she had disappeared from the paddock. I was almost convinced she had moved on to a new territory as normally she only takes a few weeks break after the young fledge. He had resolutely stayed.

When I saw this happening, I initially thought she had encouraged him to mate, but she didn’t react—note her tail tucked securely against the fence post
So I think, he might have been hoping she would move off the post, and he could pick up any scraps that were left over from her previous meal. She had caught and consumed a rat (ratus ratus). A much larger meal than the usual mouse and at one point I though she might choke getting it down.
She didn’t accept his proposal, nor did she lift off to give him access to the post.
Marital bliss in Black-shouldered Kite land.