Sunset Silhouette

[jinnymaer]

The attached picture was taken in June at about 8 pm. A friend took my husband & I to see an eagle's nest in the middle of Buckhorn Lake. Wasn't sure if I should put it here or in animals/wildlife... there is an eagle there if you look closely! It was taken from a boat on slightly rough water so I'm fairly pleased with it but I know that there is always room for improvement. I'm still learning about my camera so this was shot on auto focus in "sports" mode. Even though the boat was just drifting I still thought that would help compensate for my motion as compared to the island's stationary position.

Camera: Canon XSi
Lens: Canon EF 75 - 300mm III USM
Exposure: 0.004
ISO: 100
Shutter: 1/250
Aperture: ? (sorry)

Other than cropping out excess sky I have down nothing with it and would like to know if anyone has suggestions on whether I should adjust brightness/contrast or flash (which was on)? Also, would there be a better mode to shoot with, without going to manual focus which I think would be very tough in a bouncing boat!

Thanks in advance!

[Krusty79]

It looks like the camera metered for the sky, so that is correctly exposed, but the tree is dark with no detail. There was too much dynamic range for the camera to capture it all. If you shot RAW, you might be able to lighten it and get another jpg with a better exposure of the tree so you can blend the two exposures. However, it is so dark, you might not be able to recover any detail. Whenever you have a dark subject against a bright sky, you're going to have to pick which one you want to expose correctly unless you want to try HDR or exposure blending to overcome the dynamic range issue. However, you usually need a tripod for that and tripods don't work well on boats!

[smbtuckma]

I like the blackness to the eagle and tree. It lends more emotion to what would otherwise be a bird in a tree. You could possibly try pushing up the contrast/levels in the sky to provide for a bit more depth.

[jinnymaer]

Thanks to both of you. I love the shot as it is for what it is but I really appreciate the suggestions for what I could try to do in the future to actually capture a clearer shot of the eagle itself. I need to start using something other than complete auto when I'm doing the shooting instead of leaving it that way in case hubby wants to take a picture! I have never tried shooting in RAW and I will try that as well.