Wildlife Photography How To – Common Kestrel – “Flaps 30, Gear Down, “

As a specialist in natural history and wildlife photography it’s always difficult to decide what are your favorite images from all the frames you shoot – after all, you are quite “emotionally close” to every single one of them!

Being in it to make money in order to live makes the job a little more difficult for the simple reason that, being a photographer, the images you REALLY like are hardly ever the images the picture buyers like. So in order to make a living you have to devote the majority of your camera time to producing commercially viable images – not gallery images.

But occasionally you’ll come up with a shot that satisfies both sides of the equation – you love it yourself and are really proud of it; and it SELLS WELL!

So I thought I’d post a series of my own images that satisfy both myself and the picture buyers, and I’m going to start with one of my top 5 sellers in the last 18 months – your Uncle Andy’s infamous Kestrel shot.

wildlife photography, common Kestrel, photography technique

Common Kestrel Landing
©Andy Astbury/Wildlife in Pixels

Shot in June of 2012 at Poolbridge Farm in Yorkshire, I approached the entire shoot day with this particular shot in mind – you have to have a goal set even with wildlife photography, otherwise you just end up shooting at random; and you HAVE to be in control of at least something other than the camera!

I’d seen all the usual “kestrel perched” shots that were coming out Poolbridge, but I wanted something a little different – and I got this, which was just what I wanted.

Remember PPPPP – positive planning prevents poor performance!

So here’s how the shot was planned and executed:

This position in the Kestrels flight to the perch is BEHIND the perch – in this case an old wooden farm gate – so it happens BEFORE the bird lands on the perch.

So primary focus has to be BEHIND the perch.

Ok, we’re all good so far, but there are some very important factors to take into consideration. We want a head-on shot, the bird is flying at about 7 meters per second, and we need to take the shot when the bird is around 1 meter behind the perch.

So here’s our main problem – head on means that the closing distance rate between bird and lens is at its fastest possible, and sadly there isn’t an auto focus system on the planet that will keep up with this small target flying straight down the lens axis and guarantee you the shot.

Therefore, sad to say, but AF is out and manual focus is in!

The bird itself is a mature female so she has a wingspan of about 30 inches.

So the shot calls for the following criteria – set the camera at a distance that will capture a 30 inch wide target about 30 inches behind the perch, with a 500mm f4 lens at about 80% of full frame width. The lens needs to be manually pre-focused at the required distance and an aperture set that will give sufficient depth of field to give a good degree of sharpness over the nearest parts of the bird – beak to feet.

Simple maths tells me I need to have the bird arriving at “position X” about 40 feet or 12 meters in front of the lens.

So now it’s easy; just get my mate Mike who was with me on the day to stand about a meter behind the gate post with his hands outstretched 30 inches apart, frame up so his hands are both well in frame and about a third of the frame from its top edge. Then manually focus on his cammo patterned shirt front making sure that both lens and camera body are in MF mode and I’m all set to take the shot from a lens point of view.

Set the camera to maximum frame rate (never a good idea usually on a Nikon as it locks the AF but we are not using AF so it doesn’t matter in this instance), and now I’m all set.

The bird is 100% wild and has a nest full of screaming hungry kids to feed, but she knows that if she’s seen people about then there’s usually a tasty morsel of food on the old gate post. She perches in one of two trees while she’s deciding if its safe to come to the perch, but her approach is only head on if she’s coming in from one of them.

So now its just a case of sitting and waiting until she’s in that particular tree, and then waiting some more until she begins her approach.

Once she’s on her way I pick her up in the viewfinder of the camera when she’s about half way across the field (she’s out of focus and very fuzzy when I begin to follow her), keep her fuzzy shape in frame and she gets sharper as she gets closer, then just as she starts to get some some definition to her in the viewfinder I just press and hold down the shutter to shoot an entire buffer full of frames: remembering to keep the camera moving as it was otherwise the composition will be a bit off!

It’s a technique rather like shot-gun shooting – you need to follow trough while squeezing the trigger, otherwise you miss behind!

Don’t get me wrong, the shot wasn’t “in the can” on the first attempt, and nor was it on the forth! But the fifth time she came I nailed it. After that all I had to do was try and repeat the shot over and over again and try to get it all to come together with some good light – we got there in the end.

All in all the shot has made over 500 sales in the last 12 months or so, in all guises from small website jpegs to full size prints – so buyers like it – and I’m pleased with the shot from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint.

And it’s even been on the TV – 4 times now!

So, the job’s a good ‘un!

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Is Your Monitor Actually Up To The Job?

As photographers we have to take something of a “leap of faith” that the monitor we use to view and process our images on is actually up to the job – or do we?

No – is the short answer! As a Photoshop & Lightroom educator I try and teach this mystical thing called “Colour Management” – note the correct spelling of the word COLOUR!

The majority of amateur photographers (and a few so-called pros come to that!) seem to think that colour management is some great complicated edifice; or even some sort of “re-invention of the wheel” – and so they either bury their head in the sand or generally “pooh-pooh” the idea as unnecessary.

Well, it’s certainly NOT complicated, but it certainly IS necessary.

The first stage in a colour managed workflow is to ensure that your monitor is calibrated – in other words it is working at the correct brightness level, and the correct colour balance or white point – this will ensure that when your computer sends pure red to your monitor, pure red is seen on the screen; not red with a blue tint to it!

But correct calibration of your monitor is fairly useless if your monitor cannot reproduce a large variation of colour – in other words, if its’ colour gamut is too small.

And it’s Monitor Colour Gamut that I want to look at in this post.

The first thing I’d like you to do is open up Photoshop and go to the Colour Settings – that’s Edit>Colour Settings, or shift+cmd+K on Mac, or shift+Ctrl+K on PC.

Once this dialogue box is open, set it up as follows:

This is the optimum setup of Photoshop for digital photography as ProPhoto is the best colour space for preserving the largest number of colours captured by your dslr sensor; far better than AdobeRGB1998 – but that’s another story.

If you like you can click the SAVE button and then give this settings profile a name – I call mine ProPhoto_Balanced_CC

Now that you are working with the largest colour palette possible inside Photoshop I want you to go to File>New and created a new 500×500 pixel square with a resolution of 300 pixels per inch with the settings as follows:

Click OK and you should now have a white square.

Now go to your foreground colour, click it to bring the colour palette dialogue box into view and manually add the following values indicated by the small red arrows:

The colour will look a little different than it does in the jpeg above.

So now we have a rather lurid sickly-looking green square in the ProPhoto colour space.

Now duplicate the image TWICE and then go to Window>Arrange>3up Vertical and you should end up with a display looking like this:

Now comes the point of the exercise – click on the tab for the centre image and go Edit>Convert to Profile and choose AdobeRGB(1998) as the destination space (colour space).

Then click on the tab for the left hand image and go Edit>Convert to Profile and choose sRGB as the destination space.

Here’s the thing – if your display DOES NOT look like this:

and all three squares look the same as the square on the left then your monitor only has a small sRGB colour gamut and is going to severely inhibit your ability to process your images properly or with any degree of colour accuracy.

Monitors rely on their Colour Look-up Table or LUT in order to display colour. Calibration of the monitor can reduce the size of the available range of colours in the LUT if it’s not big enough in the first place, and so calibration can indeed make things worse from a colour point of view; BUT, it will still ensure the monitor is set to the correct levels of brightness and colour neutrality; so calibration is still a good idea.

Laptops are usually the best illustration of this small LUT problem; normally their display gamuts are barely 8bit sRGB to begin with, and if calibration drops the LUT to below 8bit then the commonest problem you see is colour banding in your images.

If however, your display looks like the image above then you’re laughing!

Why is a large monitor colour gamut essential for digital photography? Well it’s all to do with those colour spaces:

If you look at the image above you’ll see the three standard primary working colour spaces of ProPhoto, AdobeRGB(1998) and sRGB overlaid for comparison with each other. There’s also a 4th plot – this is the input space of the Canon 1Dx dslr – in other words, it encompasses all the colours the sensor of that camera can record.

In actual fact, some colours can be recorded by the camera that lie OUTSIDE even the ProPhoto colour space!

But you can clearly see that the Adobe space looses more camera-captured colour than ProPhoto – hence RAW file handlers like Lightroom work in Prophoto (or to be more strictly true MelissaRGB – but that’s yet another story!) in order to at least preserve as many of the colours captured by the camera as possible.

Even more camera colour is lost to the sRGB colour space.

So this is why we should always have Photoshop set to a default ProPhoto working space – the archival images we produce will therefore retain as much of the original colours captured by the camera as possible.

If we now turn our attention back to monitors – the windows on to our images – we can now deduce that:

a. If a monitor can only display sRGB at best, then we will only be able to see a small portion of the cameras captured colour.

b. However, if the monitor has a larger colour gamut and a bigger LUT both in terms of colour spectrum and bit depth, then we will see a lot more of the original capture colours – and the more we can see then more effectively we can colour manage.

Monitors are available that can display the Adobe colour gamut, indeed quite a few can display more colours – but if you are on a tight budget these can seem more than expensive to say the least.

A good monitor that I recommend quite a lot – indeed I use one myself – is the HP LP2475W, well worth the price if you can find one; and with a bit of tweaking it will display 98%+ of the AdobeRGB colour space in all three primary colours and even some of the warmer colours that are only ProPhoto:

The green plot is the Adobe space, the red plot is the HP LP2475W display colour space.

So it’s a good buy if you can find one.

However, there’s a catch – there always is! This monitor relies on the LUT of the graphics card driving it – plugged into the modest 512Mb nVidea GT120 on my Mac Pro it is brilliant and competes at every level with the likes of Eizo ColourEdge and NEC Spectraviews for all practical purposes. But plugged into the back of a laptop then it can only reproduce what the lower specification graphics chips can supply it with.

So there we have it, a simple way to test if your monitor is giving you the best advantage when it comes to processing your images – food for thought?

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