Does Adjusting EC Help Backlit Subjects?

There are several ways to adjust your camera’s settings for a backlit bird in the field, including Exposure Compensation (EC) and ISO adjustment.  Adjusting either one can increase or decrease the amount of light your camera lets in.  Typically in backlit situations the camera “sees” a lot of light and assuming your camera is setup in Manual Mode, it will darken the image of the bird.  I have always used EC to adjust the light the camera accepts in these situations, in fact one of my main dials is setup so I can easily adjust the EC on the fly.  When a bird is backlit I increase the EC between +1 and +2, which tells the camera to increase the ISO, which darkens the image some.  Here are some examples (all the shots had a shutter speed of 1/2000th and an aperture of f5.6 and some sharpening was applied).

I did not adjust the EC on the first image below so the bird looks dark, as expected. It is barely recognizable.  In the second picture I increased the EC to +1.33.  As you can see the bird is much more recognizable and has more detail.

I was curious to see if using the Lightroom Develop Module would allow me to equalize the differences in the above pics.  Below are the same pictures again but I made some adjustments to them.  The first picture below is the 0 EC image with the Exposure bumped up to +.25 and the Shadows moved to +82.

This last picture was taken with +1.33 EC and the Exposure was decreased by -.90 and the Shadows move to +77.

I know it is difficult here to notice fine differences but I feel that the +1.33 EC shot (with modifications) is better.  I like the sky color better.  I also believe that there is more detail to it.  When you take a picture of a bird that is dark (like the EC 0 shot) the camera loses some of the detail that dark blob.  The sensor using the +1.33 EC image captures more light and more detail.  Decreasing the Exposure doesn’t lose the detail, it just darkens the image (conversely, increasing the Exposure of a dark bird may not bring out much detail).

How do you setup your camera for a backlit bird?  I’ve probably missed some common ways to compensate and I would appreciate it if you could inform me and our GreatBirdPic readers about how you do it.

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