Always a challenge to photograph birds during a snow storm. The one big advantage – regardless of species photographed, I’m almost assured to be alone because no one else usually ventures out in these conditions.

This Snowy photo does bring with it its lot of problems in post-production. The original .raw is dark and uniformly bleu/cyan in colour with little detail. But, surprisingly, there is a lot of information in the .raw file – it’s just a question of tweaking it out.

The bird, foreground and background are all treated separately so as not to conflict with each other. The result is not perfect, and I’m sure others can arrive at a much better result, but I am satisfied.

Canon 5D Mark III with my 500L f4 lens handheld @ 1/1000, f8, ISO 800, + 1 exposure compensation. The relatively high f stop at 800 ISO is for me surprising for the scene – a sufficient amount of light was available.

Cropped slightly for composition and framing purposes. Two annoying big snow flakes “healed” away from the face. Background despeckled.

And yes, it was cold out there that day.

Cheers,

Mike