jimva wrote:Thanks! I do convert from RAW to JPEG in the camera but I lose some quality. For instance a blue sky will turn turqouise. The sky usaully is behind some trees so it does not dominate the background. Any help is appreciated. Also I am trying to learn how to obtain better images when shooting birds against a blue sky. I pretty much get a shilouette.
OK sky changing colors is off the wall. I've never seen anything like that in my experience.... but stranger things have been known to happen. Are you setting a white balance or are you letting the camera do it for you? How much of the image is in your control and how much are you placing in the hands of the camera? Without knowing what experience you have and your background in digital, I would suggest that you play with the white balance, as well as the contrast settings on the camera, until your colors come around to what you want. I shoot Large Fine .jpgs with my D-200, and get images that come out as I visualized them with out any extensive computer work (post processing). I've never played around with RAW (.nef) image data, I just don't want to spend the time. If I did, I would (and do) shoot film. If you continue to shoot RAW, you want to learn about RAW converters for your computer. These are stand alone software packages that interpret the RAW image, which is simple the data collected by the sensor with no information on how it should be rendered in to an image. You set the converter to make the data look like you visualized the photo in the field. Then you get to learn Photoshop or one of it's clones, to finish the process.
There are a number of Birders here, that can improve your bird photos, but basically shooting anything small on a large blue sky backdrop is going to give you a silhouette. To minimize this you will want to experiment with the metering options on your camera. Also experiment with Bracketing, and pay attention to which exposure values give you the results you want. Basically you are going to be looking to add a stop or maybe more to the exposure. This will over expose the sky, but render the silhouette as a bird and not a black spot. The best solution is to find birds that are roosting away form the sky of course.
hope this is useful,
Chris