A pair of American Avocets at Sunset

Posted by Vaibhav (Stanford, United States) on 30 September 2009 in Animal & Insect and Portfolio.

These pair of American Avocets were enjoying the warm evening sun while doing their routine stuff. I liked the composition as is and decided to take the photo.
Crouching then to bring my head in level with the birds, I looked through the lens and decided upon the composition: birds at right corner with their reflection forming a nice leading line. The next step was to decide upon the aperture as it controls DOF and I wanted both birds to be sharp in the photo. The depth of focus preview button in the camera comes in very handy and I found that f/5.6 was good enough for this particular scene.

The next and most important step is to decide upon exposure time. The birds with both light and dark feathers pose an interesting challenge: the whites need to be managed to avoid blown feather highlights while leaving enough details in the blacks. Such a photo would be very difficult under the harsh midday sun but in evening, the warm light comes to the rescue. Keeping all the above in mind, using spot metering and carefully exposing whites, I finally pressed the shutter and made this photo.

Post processing was simple: adjusting white balance, sharpening and cropping in photoshop.

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