Glossy Starling

Madikwe Game Reserve

Nikon D300, Nikon 80-200 @ 200, 1/1250, f/3.5, ISO 400

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The Glossy Starling must be one of the most common birds you will see on a safari in Southern Africa.  Most of the time they look pretty plain, and almost pure black, but sometimes when the sun catches them at the right angle they come alive.  Metallic greens, blues and purples make for a fantastic sight yet capturing the colors must be one of the more difficult shots to get.  I shot the above image over the weekend and even though it is not even close to a great image, at least it shows some of the colors on this normally overlooked bird.

The reason I chose the above image is not only because time was a bit tight today but I also felt like the last few posts were a bit lion heavy – if that’s possible??  It just so happened that the last few days have been fantastic lion photography and I did not want to go back to older images just yet.  Other plans for those.   Another reason is that I am looking into various color spaces for both print and web images.  sRGB versus Adobe RGB versus ProPhoto RGB and then of course the way a Mac screen displays images in a different way to a Windows driven pc and  the differing results, when using the various different settings, was specifically noticeable in this image.  Will do a post on this in the coming weeks but for now just playing around with some ideas and different ways of saving files specifically for the web.  Out of interest, what color space are you working in in Photoshop?  Just curios as the results are very different!

Until next time!

Gerry