Silvereyes Bonanza - An Afternoon Feast

This afternoon, I had an absolute blast capturing a bunch of shots I'm quite pleased with. It was slightly overcast, a "conveniently located" branch of the bottlebrush was starting to go into full bloom, and I still had my camera in 8fps AF drive from yesterday's bread-feeding frenzy...

These are just some of favourites from the set.. More are included down below

Canon 7D - Blue-Green Twilight Color Balance - Revisited

In a post last month, I discussed a new tool for fine tuning white balance in-camera: White Balance Shift. Since then, I've been playing around with this setting on a numerous occasions, with mixed results (notably, for the tail end of the sunset on Aug 20). Last week, an opportunity to use this came up, with a crisp clear night and the fickle blue-green twilight that had eluded me up till now...

Finally, I think I've nailed it! The shot above was all in-camera white balance (no tweaks applied, as far as I can remember). The settings for this are as follows:

• White Balance Mode (aka "Base" WB) = Shade
• WB Shift = B7, G6
• Exposure Compensation = -1 1/3

Contrary to my initial belief, it was necessary to bias the WB towards blue (instead of amber) to really draw out those rich bluish-green hues. Otherwise, you just get purple blue, with all the green-bits turned to white or faint orange-yellow. So, there you have it! The recipe for capturing blue-green twilights.

Canon 7D Tricks I just learned of...

After close to four years of using my Canon 7D (I got it in early September 2010, about 1-2 days before the first quake - I still hadn't properly unboxed my macro lens when the 7.1 struck, which sent that lens-still-securely-boxed-up flying into the trash can into a soft bed of crumpled tissues), today I suddenly came across some features I hadn't known existed. One thing led to another, and now I've just picked up a bunch of new features which look interesting enough that I'll need to spend some time playing with them for sure...