My girlfriend's bird, Chico, had his first birthday a few days ago and she asked me to fire up the lights, camera and the action to see if we could get some fun images of him outside in one of the trees around our house.
The odd thing about this picture is that it was taken during the day. Open shade provided most of the lighting here—you can see raw sun sneaking in on a branch about half way up the far right side of the frame—then, in an attempt to simulate the golden "magic hour" lighting sunset is so famous for, I placed a strobe behind and to the left of the tree. This produced a yellow line down the left side of Chico and added to the leaves a great combination of gold and green. The background went dark because I was working at a somewhat fast shutter speed (1/125) combined with a very closed down aperture (f/14) all at ISO 200....so the already dark ambient light in the deeply shaded porch was considerably underexposed.
Very little was done to this image in Photoshop: This was taken with a digital SLR, so I pumped the color saturation a bit to simulate the Fuji Velvia film popular with wildlife and landscape photographers.
This shot came together pretty quickly and actually ended up looking very close to exactly what I'd envisioned as I hurried to set up before Chico lost interest in the whole thing. Turns out, he was pretty mesmerized by my beeping camera and the flashing yellow light behind him.
Nydia got some shots she's quite happy with and it was a nice little exercise for me to see how quickly I could conceptualize a lighting scenario using the available light as my key and produce a great image. Success!
Thanks for reading.
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