The Other 1%

When out in the field photographing, 99% of the times things don't go exactly the way you might like them to.  Then there is that 1%. During my trip to Smoky Mountains National Park back in April, I was photographing on Clingman's Dome. I was taking shots of a group of dead trees using a 70-200mm lens.  Suddenly I saw a bird land on top of one of the dead trunks.  I thought it would make a very nice silhouette picture, but it needed a much closer viewpoint than the 200mm lens could provide.  I had my 400mm f5.6 lens with me but never thought the bird would stay put long enough for me to change over to it.  So I clicked off a few shots with the 70-200. Not expecting success, I decided to try to make the switch over to the 400mm.

So I went ahead and took the camera off the tripod and switched lenses.  I was amazed to find that the bird was actually still there!  Then I started moving quickly because I thought there might actually be half a chance of making the image.  I composed, manually focused with live view, and knocked off a shot or two.

Then I got greedy.  The way I composed the image the best pose,in my mind, would be for the bird to look off to the left where there was more empty space as well as another tree.  Yup, the bird did it and I took the picture.

It doesn't usually work out this way, but I was glad it did!

Bird And Tree

Copyright Howard Grill

In terms of processing, there was little I had to do to the image.  First, I added just a touch of contrast and a bit of sharpening to the main silhouette of the tree and bird.  The image was actually made at sunrise with fog in the air and the actual color was a very muddy orange, which just didn't look all that appealing to me.  So I decided to turn the clock back an hour or two and changed the color temperature to a much cooler bluish hue.

Sometimes it comes easy.  Most of the time it doesn't.