When photographing white on white subjects like this mute swan on snow in eastern Canada, you have to carefully monitor the exposure. If the picture is too dark -- and white subjects influence the meter in the direction of underexposure -- use the exposure compensation on the camera to make the correction in 1/3 f/stop increments. If you use manual exposure mode, the exposure comp. function is diabled. However, when shooting birds or wildlife, you should never use manual mode simply because it's too slow. You should be using one of the automatic exposure modes, such as P, Av, or Tv. For this picture, I used aperture priority because I wanted to make sure that the entire bird, from the foreground to the background, was sharp. I used a 280mm focal length here (70-200mm plus a 1.4 teleconverter) and that meant depth of field was fairly shallow. That's why I chose f/11.
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