{"id":1645,"date":"2010-05-01T16:50:53","date_gmt":"2010-05-01T20:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/?p=1645"},"modified":"2011-02-24T11:48:35","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T15:48:35","slug":"one-piece-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/2010\/05\/01\/one-piece-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"One Piece at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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Canon 800mm f\/5.6L IS lens with the EOS-1D Mark IV. ISO 400. Evaulative metering +1\/3 stop: 1\/640 sec. at f\/7.1 set manually. Fill flash at -3 stops with the better beamer.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

I created the image above (yeah, I know; it’s pretty bad as is…) this morning at the Cozad Ranch in Linn, TX. Working with the 800 things were tight. I knew that I had at least one good head angle with the whole bird in the frame but the compositions were poor and unbalanced at best. The bird was moving up and down the perch rapidly in search of the almond butter mix on the rear side of the perch. Thinking digitally, knowing that I would need source material for the perch so that I could lose the orange, I created the image below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Canon 800mm f\/5.6L IS lens with the EOS-1D Mark IV. ISO 400. Evaulative metering +1\/3 stop: 1\/640 sec. at f\/7.1 set manually. Fill flash at -3 stops with the Better Beamer.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Then I realized that creating a pano that included the entire top of the perch might be the best plan so I created a third image (below). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Canon 800mm f\/5.6L IS lens with the EOS-1D Mark IV. ISO 400. Evaulative metering +1\/3 stop: 1\/640 sec. at f\/7.1 set manually. Fill flash at -3 stops with the better beamer.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

I brought the three images into Photoshop, expanded canvas top and left, brought in the Quick Masked sections from the two source material images, aligned them, adjusted the brightness by pulling the curve up or down as needed, blended the edges, filled in missing background areas, reduced the background noise, cleaned up the perch, and did a bit of Eye Doctor work. Voila: in about fifteen minutes I had the image that I had visualized. In my head \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This quasi-panoramic image of a male Golden-fronted Woodpecker was created by compositing three images.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

The key to the success of the final image was made possible because I thought to create the source images in the field immediately after viewing the image captures of the bird on the camera’s LCD. By learning to think digitally in the field you can do the very same thing. I used a variety of techniques from Digital Basics and Robert O’Toole’s APTATS I and APTATS II files. See the BAA Store for details on these great educational PDFs. <\/p>\n

BTW, apologies to Johnny Cash on the title of this blog-post \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ngg_shortcode_4_placeholder Canon 800mm f\/5.6L IS lens with the EOS-1D Mark IV. ISO 400. Evaulative metering +1\/3 stop: 1\/640 sec. at f\/7.1 set manually. Fill flash at -3 stops with the better beamer. <\/p>\n

I created the image above (yeah, I know; it’s pretty bad as is…) this morning at the Cozad Ranch in Linn, TX. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[89,28,55,5,14,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-89","category-800mm-f5-6","category-cozad-ranch","category-educational","category-photography-tips","category-photoshop-tips","category-workflow-tips","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}