Hi! I am Janine, and I am with Pangolin Photo Safaris on the Chobe River today.
We are going to shoot a Pied Kingfisher with a beautiful dark background
to show you the importance of choosing the right background for your image.
Pied Kingfishers are quite patient birds on the Chobe river, and we are going to
try and sneak up to him with our beautiful 600 mm lens that we have here.
Over there, you see the Pied Kingfisher sitting beautifully in the sun.
In front of a very dark stump. So, we are going to try and under expose him
by roughly minus 2. I don't want any highlights clipped, therefore the
background will turn pitch-black, or almost pitch-black. That will really
elevate the subject from its background. It will look really beautiful and 'pop'.
Let's give it a try.
While I look at him, I see he is looking to the left,
so I am going to shift my focus point a bit to the right - and up - therefore when I focus
on his face, I give him a little bit of space to look into your picture
and for your imagination to roam wild.
That looks beautiful!!
Let's have a look on that nice dark background over here.
We are going to give it a try in portrait. Also, we don't need to have a very fast shutter speed
in this instance, even though it is a bird. We are only shooting him sitting still.
So we want to make sure we double our focal length, which is a 600mm lens.
I am going to shoot him around 1/2000 sec, with the crop factor, that should make
sure that I don't shake out my picture.
NICE!
Make sure you get the glint in the eye, and a little bit of a sparkle on the beak,
otherwise the black beak will merge with the dark background, and we try to avoid that.
Hi. I am Janine, and I am with Pangolin Photo Safaris, in the editing suite
of the Pangolin Chobe Hotel, here in Botswana.
Earlier this morning, we shot a beautiful Pied Kingfisher against a dark background. Now I want to go ahead
and download the pictures and have a look how we can edit them together.
Let's get started.
Here, I have one of the shots of the Pied Kingfisher.
You see, it is a beautiful dark background to start with, and we're going to try and shoot
as close as possible in camera as we can, so that we minimize our editing effect,
and then it also doesn't look so over edited. Even if you shoot on raw.
I advise always to have a quick look at your settings. It teaches you a lot about
what you do out there in the field. I was shooting fast - not fast enough to catch
the pied kingfisher in flight - but for a portrait it would have been good enough.
A fairly low f-stop. We were drifting quite a lot, so I did not want to shoot much
lower than that. I knew my background is going to be black, and therefore not an issue.
and therefore not an issue. Because I am asking for very little light, for a change,
my ISO could drop down nicely. So, we are not going to have an
issue with a noisy or grainy picture in this instance. This morning, I advised you all
to shift your focus point over to the right-hand side, so that the bird has
space to look into the frame. However, you see in this photograph, that is not the case.
Sometimes life comes different than what we would like it to be.
Post-production editing affords us the beautiful chance to correct some of our mistakes.
In this instance, I would really crop that picture down.
I like lots of negative space, but in this instance, he just doesn't have enough space on the left hand side.
It is too unbalanced.
So I am going to crop it down to make sure that
the bird is sitting more on the right-hand side of the photograph.
Putting the eye on the top third of the horizontal line.
Like that.
It looks a lot more balanced.
He is looking from right to left,
which is according to photography rules not ideal. In Western cultures we read
from left to right, so it looked natural (for us) if animals look from left to right.
We could flip it around but it's a matter of taste, really, at the end.
If I go to my basic settings here, my major goal in this instance is to try and get my
exposure right. Not the overall exposure in the frame. You see my histogram is
leaning heavily to the left for the dark background, but in order to get the
exposure in the bird right. When I have a look, all these white colours shouldn't be
blown out. You see, if I hover my mouse over the whitest part underneath the
histogram you'll see some numbers. None of them reach a hundred.
That means I haven't blown my whites. That was my goal.
I'm going to try and get a perfect
exposure by balancing my whites and my blacks. The way I am going to do it is,
I am going take the white slider and press the ALT button at the very same time.
As I slide the slider you'll see the bird appearing - I don't want to see any whites.
Anything that is white has been blown, so I want to just slide it far enough that
don't see any white bits. We do the same, the other way around. If I see
blacks in the background, that is fine. I strived for a nice and dark background.
I strived for a nice and dark background, but I really don't want to have any
blacks in my bird, because they are lost information. You will see I hardly shifted
the sliders at the end. We were on a pretty decent exposure to start with.
If you want to, you can make the shadows even darker in the background.
I am going to pull my highlights to the negative side - not too far - because then our bird
becomes dull. But enough that the feathers become slightly more visible.
There we go. He has a beautiful 'catch light' in the eye. Exactly what we wanted.
Because I shot on a raw file - you see it's a CR2 file.
I am going to have to sharpen my image afterwards.
By nature, it is not really sharp, and yet, if I sharpen
too extreme, I am going to get a very pixelated effect in my bird.
You might see it here in our detailed view. I shot on a low ISO. It is not going to be
too much of an issue, but you have to be careful, especially if you end up
printing quite large. In order to avoid this effect, I am going to be masking my picture.
Masking means that I'm not going going to sharpen the entire screen
(the entire surface area) but only certain bits. The most contrasted bits - that our
eyes are going to catch onto - when we look at the picture for the first time.
So we are going to take the masking slider. I am going to press my ALT button.
You see, everything that is white, is being sharpened. I only want the rough
outlines to be sharpened. Then I can sharpen a little bit stronger,
without affecting any pixelation. If you want the bird to 'pop' just a tad more,
you can also play with your clarity. Especially on a picture with the low ISO.
There we go. That is pretty much all we need to do.
if you enjoy your effects,
you can add a little bit of a dark vignette around it. It works really well on a
picture with a dark background, because it doesn't look fake and obtrusive.
It might take the highlights out of this corner a little bit more.
I could decide to make the background pitch black. These highlights are here because those other
bits in the photograph that were still illuminated by the sun, and not in the shadow.
Or you can leave it natural. I don't feel these highlights are bothering my eye.
They are not too bright. It looks natural to have a little bit of pattern
around here in the background. It was fairly easy to edit.
It was pretty close in camera, and that's what we strive to achieve.
Thanks for watching guys.
I really hope this video was helpful to you.
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Bye bye!