[font color=\'#000000\']> more luck with Ravens
You know now that you mention it for all I know my shot is a raven also. All I know is that they're very friendly and you can get within a few feet of them. They seem to enjoy posing.
> The idea I guess with shooting RAW is to get a bit more range so that some of the detail in the dark birds shows up
Yes, the idea is not to be subjected to the in-camera jpeg tonal curve which usually compresses shadows more than you'd like with a dark subject. C1 just happens to default to extracting reasonable shadows, but using other converters you should be able to tweak to get the same or similar result.
> when you shoot raw on dark bird such as the crow, do you open up an extra stop?
It depends on the background. If sky/clouds are involved, usually not as I don't want to sacrifice them, but if the bg is more midtone perhaps yes. I expose using a the spot meter on my 1D and my general rule for dark or light subjects is to keep within 2 stops of center, so if I spot a dark bird I would expose to keep the bird no darker than -2, or a white bird (speaking of
seagulls) at no more than +2. This pretty much guarantees that you maintain reasonable detail.
- DL[/font]