{"id":1515,"date":"2016-03-07T20:05:05","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T12:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ywo.id.au\/blog\/?p=1515"},"modified":"2025-02-23T21:37:50","modified_gmt":"2025-02-23T13:37:50","slug":"ducks-and-cockatoos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/2016\/03\/07\/ducks-and-cockatoos\/","title":{"rendered":"Ducks and cockatoos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was the Labour Day<\/a> holiday in Perth, and a sunny day for photography at Jackadder Lake in the suburb of Woodlands<\/a>. I didn’t actually visit the lake with the aim of photographing birds (otherwise I certainly would’ve\u00a0brought my telephoto zoom lens along), but I noticed avian activity in a particular area and walked over to see if any good opportunities would come around.<\/p>\n

Two ducks were my first subjects for the morning. As they were swimming fairly close to the shore, I don’t think I fared too badly with my 85 mm lens\u2014though I did have\u00a0to crop the frames to get the images below. I’m normally shooting at ISO 1600 or 3200 with f\/1.4 or f\/2, so it was a nice change to have plenty of light available; ISO 200 or 400 with f\/4 still allowed me to shoot with exposure durations in the thousandths of a second.<\/p>\n

\"Ducks,
Ducks, March 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This first scene was completely under shade and, although it’s probably more difficult to tell in a 600 x 400 pixel image, the white duck on the right presented a fair challenge to shooting and post-processing to preserve\u00a0micro contrast<\/a>\u00a0as best\u00a0possible. Without some care, most of the duck would have turned out as the same blue-grey colour, with no character or detail to the plumage.<\/p>\n

\"Ducks,
Ducks, March 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This second picture shows the benefit of shooting in RAW format rather than JPEG. With the white duck having part of its body in direct sunlight and the rest under shade, there was an enormous amount of contrast in this scene. Shooting with JPEG would have ended up with the directly-lit parts of the duck ‘burned out’ to pure white. With a RAW file, I could adjust the exposure more or less exactly to my liking, retaining detail in the plumage whether it was under direct sunlight or in the shade.<\/p>\n

There were many cockatoos flying around, and my next subjects were\u00a0Little Corellas. The next four images are actually of three different individual birds; only the last two pictures are of the same bird, in sequence.<\/p>\n

\"Cockatoo,
Cockatoo, March 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite shooting at distance (I’d estimate at least 30\u201340 m) and cropping the frame heavily, you can see some detail in the wing feathers in the picture above. Again, shooting in RAW format allowed me to conserve some subtlety in this high-contrast scene. With JPEG, the parts of the bird\u00a0under the wings and body (i.e., in shade) would have had little visible detail to them.<\/p>\n

\"Cockatoo,
Cockatoo, March 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While still a high-contrast scene, this second cockatoo picture shows the wing plumage to better effect. The wingtip feathers are discernible, thanks to some local\u00a0sharpening in post-processing, even at this relatively small image size. You can also just make out a hint of pink colouring between the beak and the eye, which helps identify the bird as a Little Corella.<\/p>\n

\"Cockatoo,
Cockatoo, March 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now we’re starting to see some substantial detail, despite being limited to a short telephoto lens. The wing placement perhaps isn’t ideal (depending on one’s tastes), but the bird is close enough so that individual feathers are easily distinguished from each other. This cockatoo was coming in to land on a tree branch, and I managed to shoot a sequence, of which the picture above and the one below came out best.<\/p>\n

\"Cockatoo,
Cockatoo, March 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The bird is now almost completely in shade, and its wings look almost transparent. From this angle and with this lighting, it’s obvious how much of each wing is\u00a0feather rather than muscle. I’m not an ornithologist or aeronautical engineer, but I can\u00a0appreciate excellent design when I see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was the Labour Day holiday in Perth, and a sunny day for photography at Jackadder Lake in the suburb of Woodlands. I didn’t actually visit the lake with the aim of photographing birds (otherwise I certainly would’ve\u00a0brought my telephoto zoom lens along), but I noticed avian activity in a particular area and walked over… Continue reading Ducks and cockatoos<\/span> →<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[303,302,222,63,28,304],"class_list":["post-1515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","tag-birds","tag-jackadder-lake","tag-nikkor-af-85-1-4","tag-perth","tag-photographic-technique","tag-woodlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4160,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515\/revisions\/4160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ywo.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}