Pine Grosbeak

Pine Grosbeak, Seward, Alaska.

Another visitor to our backyard mountain ash.  These guys are a little more approachable, but nothing like the crows.  I actually tried to slowly touch one of the crows feeding in this tree the other day – I thought he might let me, but he finally hopped to another branch once I got within a foot.

I have had a number of questions about the settings used for some of my recent photos, I will try to get into the habit of posting such information after the jump – that way those that don’t care can ignore it!

This was captured with a 100-400 at 400.  I rarely crop an image, but I did crop this from horizontal, to a semi vertical.  I used 500 iso because I needed all the shutter speed I could get on this dark winter day – I wouldn’t hesitate to go to 800 with my camera if needed. 

I photographed this with my maximum aperture of 5.6 which gave me 1/320 of a second.  Because I used flash, these settings provided the exposure for my background.  Since the background was a white sky and snow, I over compensated 2 stops to keep it white.  I could have lowered this exposure value for a dark background. 

I dialed in + 1 stop of exposure for the flash, this might have been a little more then necessary, but I wanted a brightly lit bird.  Without flash, the bird was very dark, and the rich reds didn’t show at all.