I took the chance to photograph a lone crow standing on my hedge. It was at a decent range, so I turned away from the small birds at my feeder and paid some attention to the far less social crow. Out of all the birds that visit the crows keep a much larger distance and are much wearier of humans than the others.

As an added challenge, black objects are much trickier to take detailed images of at a whim. This particular shoot was at a bright midday and my metering mode will have been reducing the harsh light washing in on my little colourful subjects. I was using spot metering and saw different results as I shot. Some images had a nice even environment with the crow being dark and textureless, while others had the detail of the crow looking fantastic but the environment washed out.

The pattern of the crow’s feathers where the most interesting and important detail for me to catch and the overexposed area around the crow was much easier to fix in post-production.

As a final touch, I’ve removed the colour from the image. This is an easy option with a subject that has little. The main result of this removes the colour from the background and reduces any distractions away from the main subject.