thanks Akira. The last one seems to be popular with many. It must be the unusual perspective. You are right. Mongo loves studying the facial expressions of creatures generally. It often gives away what they are thinking …or as you say, their intentions. Believe it or not, this is quite important to give you notice and to be prepared to capture that take off, imminent squabble or other photographic event.
Nikkor Shooter. Big thanks for your comments and CC. The image was originally darker. Mongo did some layer work to raise the light primarily on the subject bird only. This was done for two reasons. first, it brought out sufficient detail in the bird without over exposing it in its naturally dark environment. Secondly, by leaving the background virtually as dark as it was, it created a good background contrast/differential against which the bird could better stand out….but subtly.
thank you Jim and Bill for your kind comments.feedback.
Thank you Keith for your comments and question. Mongo finds that in this fairly extreme light environment, you cannot really trust the flash auto settings not to be fooled. For this reason, Mongo always uses manually adjusted output settings both on the flash and the camera. As a general rule, Mongo finds that the auto settings on the flash are too harsh because it is trying to over compensate what it perceives as a very dark environment. Mongo’s flash is set to TTL mode but virtually permanently set to -0.7 or -1.0 EV for all situations. This tends to give a better balanced “fill flash” look. Now and then, have had to drop output even more to say, -1.3 to -1.7 EV. Sometimes, a couple of test shots are needed to get this as correct as possible.
In the images above, BOTH the camera and the TTL flash were set to -0.7 EV.
