In the Field

Feeling Better Little Buddy? Findlay Creek, BC, Canada. March 9, 2012.

Here's a different one for ya! One of the things I like most about photography is that there are SO darned many sides to it. In this day and age, the technical side of it, complete with a preoccupation with technology, occupies a LOT of the discussion about photography. And there is, of course, the creative side of photography - the lighting, the composition, etc. And, of course, the technical side and creative sides overlap - for instance in issues like "...given the constraints imposed by the dynamic range of my camera, how can I most effectively capture and process this high-contrast scene to reproduce the beauty of what I saw in the field?"

But there's at least one more side to photography - the one that involves the actual content (or subject) of the image. Take this image - I could rip it apart from a technical perspective - not super sharp, somewhat noisy, etc. And, while it has a fairly nice diagonal flow, it's not too strong from a creative perspective either - the background is distracting, the light couldn't be much flatter, etc. Yet since snapping this shot last weekend (and it IS a snapshot!), everyone I have shown it too has fallen in love with it (or at least reacted very strongly to it). EVERY shot we take is a mix of technical, creative, and content-based factors and there is no single formula you can follow to balance these factors and guarantee any given shot is going to work.

I tend to be quite deliberate in my shooting - I do a lot of planning and, as anyone who has spent time with me in the field knows, I tend to be quite up on the technical side of things. In the big picture - and partly because I'm primarily a wildlife shooter where sometimes you simply have to react fast - I'm probably a little less deliberate than your average landscape shooter. But given my predisposition toward towards deliberating on shots, it's been a great - and very refreshing - exercise for me to pick up a simpler (but highly competent) camera like the Nikon V1 (which i used for this shot) and, when the right moment occurs, forget about the technical end and...just shoot!

Oh, about the shot. I had just returned from a long walk with my dogs (with my trusty Nikon V1 on my belt system) and found that a female (or immature male) Pine Grosbeak had flown into one of the windows on our cabin and stunned itself. It was raining at the time so I picked up the bird and placed it on a sheltered waist-high stump to let it recuperate before flying off. Apparently my younger Portuguese Water Dog (Poncho) saw me do it and over the next little while he went to the stump several times, reached up, and touched his nose to the bird's beak. I have no clue what he was doing or thinking at the time, but it wasn't a big leap to think he was checking it out (a "Feeling better little buddy?" kind of thing). But for all I know he may have been trying to decide if the bird was edible or not. Anyway...he DIDN'T try to eat it and an hour or so later the bird flew off...

Behind the Camera

Feeling Better Little Buddy? Findlay Creek, BC, Canada. March 9, 2012.

Digital Capture; RAW 12-bit format; ISO 800.

Nikon V1 paired with Nikkor 1 30-110 /3.8-5.6 zoom at 110mm (297mm EFL). Hand-held.

1/100s @ f7.1; no compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.

At the Computer

Feeling Better Little Buddy? Findlay Creek, BC, Canada. March 9, 2012.

RAW Conversion to 16-bit TIFF, including first-pass/capture sharpening using Phase One's Capture One Pro 6. Two exposure variants covering a 0.5 stop total range, from -0.7 stops below original capture (to reduce brightness of background and highlights) through to -0.2 stops from original exposure (for both subjects).

Further digital corrections on resulting 16-bit TIFF files using Adobe's Photoshop CS5 and Light Craft's Lightzone. Photoshop adjustments including compositing (via layering and masking) the exposure variants, selective colour saturation and desaturation, and selective sharpening for web output. Final tone tweaking performed using tonemapper/re-light in Lightzone.

Conservation

Feeling Better Little Buddy? Findlay Creek, BC, Canada. March 9, 2012.

Not Applicable - neither Poncho the Portuguese Water Dog or this Pine Grosbeak are threatend with extinction.