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Description
A wildlife shot with artificial light. This is a Martial Eagle. If you're working with captive birds, why settle for natural lighting anyway? This was originally meant to be shot with three good wireless strobes, but one failed (aka broke into pieces) at the start of the shoot. Ouch, my wallet. So i decided to take a low-key shot instead. Here the flash is zoomed in to 70mm, about 6ft from the bird on the left. This is actually in broad daylight but against a dark background. Glass stopped down to f/11 at ISO100 and flash sync shutter speed means that you don't see any natural light at all though, and the angle of incidence of the light makes the eye glow nicely without any need for postprocessing.

No crop, slight tweak in contrast and tone curve, cloning some stray feather bits on the beak and around the place, tiny subtle bit of dodging and burning to bring out a little more texture on the feathers above and below the eye and to dial down the feathers below the beak.

Although taken at the same time as Ecliptic 2, this was waiting for the conclusion of a contest before it was posted. It was officially released at the Sundown UK demoscene party, where it won in the photography category: www.pouet.net/results.php?whic…

It also won an honourable mention in a contest at DPChallenge (www.dpchallenge.com/image.php?…

This went on to win the weekly ongoing photography stackexchange contest: meta.photo.stackexchange.com/a…

As always, prints are available at riot.dpcprints.com .

Description
A wildlife shot with artificial light. This is a Martial Eagle. If you're working with captive birds, why settle for natural lighting anyway? This was originally meant to be shot with three good wireless strobes, but one failed (aka broke into pieces) at the start of the shoot. Ouch, my wallet. So i decided to take a low-key shot instead. Here the flash is zoomed in to 70mm, about 6ft from the bird on the left. This is actually in broad daylight but against a dark background. Glass stopped down to f/11 at ISO100 and flash sync shutter speed means that you don't see any natural light at all though, and the angle of incidence of the light makes the eye glow nicely without any need for postprocessing.

No crop, slight tweak in contrast and tone curve, cloning some stray feather bits on the beak and around the place, tiny subtle bit of dodging and burning to bring out a little more texture on the feathers above and below the eye and to dial down the feathers below the beak.

Although taken at the same time as Ecliptic 2, this was waiting for the conclusion of a contest before it was posted. It was officially released at the Sundown UK demoscene party, where it won in the photography category: www.pouet.net/results.php?whic…

It also won an honourable mention in a contest at DPChallenge (www.dpchallenge.com/image.php?…

This went on to win the weekly ongoing photography stackexchange contest: meta.photo.stackexchange.com/a…

As always, prints are available at riot.dpcprints.com .