Here are my bird silhouette entries for #smap by
First we start out with a turkey buzzard.
I took these on top of a hill on an overcast day, this tends to cause silhouettes to happen with backlighting from the sky.
Fortunately some of the light bled through his wings.
Here is a bit of a problematic bird to shoot. The indigo bunting with backlighting tends to turn into almost a solid black silhouette even though he is a really bright blue.
He flew off to another branch with more light but the sky also backlit him so his vibrant blue ended up being pretty dark.
Shooting through leaves also tends to end up creating silhouettes. I'm not sure what bird this is, possibly an Eastern Wood-Pewee, I remember hearing it's pewee sound and its wing pattern seems to be correct. Sadly this is a tiny bird that is usually high up in a tree backlit against the sky and I've mostly ended up with silhouettes of them.
Another challenging bird to shoot is any sort of blackbird. This copper headed cowbird is almost a silhouette even though it had direct sunlight on it. You almost have to move the camera to catch the correct sheen of the sunlight on its copper feathers to get a good photo of them.
Here is another challenging tiny bird to shoot against a backlit sky.
This is a common yellow throat after some major adjustments in camera raw format. The problem with camera raw adjustments is the noise that is introduced in the dark areas. Fortunately there is a nice reduce noise feature in camera raw but on drastic adjustments like this you end up with a painterly look to the photo. Thus you have to start creating many layers of the same image masked out for each light and dark region to balance out a mostly silhouetted photo. For a good pose it is worth photoshopping out the light and dark regions.
