Of all the things which consume my photography, magpies rank somewhere up near the top. That’s not to say that they’re numerically more significant, by any means: just that, whenever I run into them, I find that I really really want to capture what they actually look like! And they move!
The thing about magpies is that they’re black, white, and … iridescent. This just doesn’t come through in most photos, possibly because the birds only have their colored plumage certain times of the year; probably because most pictures operate within a fairly narrow dynamic range: either your white is dull, or your black is really a dark gray. The iridescence of the magpie is on the tail feathers, and it’s very subtle. In order to show it, most of the time you’d have to overexpose the picture such that the black of the feathers would appear washed out, over-exposed. Not the case any more!
The new camera (Canon 7D) has a feature which they’ve called Highlight Tone Priority. Their explanation is rather different from what I’m interested in, which is that I can balance my bright tones and the shadowy tones differently for an individual shot, giving me something like the magpie shown here: the white is white, while the black … really shows the color of the tail-feathers. To me, it’s sort of like a single-shot version of High Dynamic Range photography (where multiple shots are exposed and re-mixed into a single shot, with every area of the shot exposed properly – as if your eyes were looking at a scene, not fixing their pupils at one opening and then looking around.
In any event, yes, I’m loving the new camera, and what it does for my photography!