This week the Show Me A Photo Contest is all about bird silhouettes. Many thanks to @nelinoeva and the Feather Friends team for running this awesome contest!
We all remember the old photography adage about keeping the sun at your back so that your subject is well illuminated. This is very important in bird and wildlife photography but sometimes you just can't make it happen.
(Fuji X-T4, 200mm, f/4.8, 1/2000, ISO 2500)
So what are you going to do with a photo like this? You either go with the silhouette and claim you made this for the artistry of it all, or you try to "fix" it in post-processing. As @nelinoeva discusses in her post, attempts to lift the shadows often make things worse. I'm going to claim this photo was done on purpose because I love silhouettes. This will be my entry for the contest.
Birds in-flight captured against a white or blue sky often look weird and it's very difficult to correct. I have a lot of photos of herons flying high overhead and they usually come out like this...
Above: I think a hard silhouette against a blue sky looks better than a white sky but I'm still tempted to try to repair this.
I like silhouettes, but can you "fix" this?
You should always try to get the exposure right in-camera and avoid the problem but with birds flying all over the sky, you don't have a lot of time to make adjustments... Now and then I have been able to make fairly convincing corrections in post-processing. See the next two gif files for before and after shots of a crow and an eagle:
I pulled up the shadows on this crow enough to reveal a lot of details, but does it look right? I think I pushed it too far... the crow is supposed to look black.
Here's a better example... If I leave this bird in full silhouette it's not easy to identify, but after pulling up the shadows you can see that this is a juvenile bald eagle.
So what's your opinion? Do you enjoy silhouettes or do you post-process and try to reveal details in the shadows? I'd love to hear your opinion.
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