[wim]

Yeah, and 14 stops is just a dark bird against a cloudy sky. That happens in real life. Getting back some birds-eyes without too much noise has nothing to do with wrong exposure, just with a big scale of DR.

 

Well, I am afraid I would personally call that bad exposure if it happened to me. If the eyes of a bird are very important to me, I would make sure the exposure would put those eyes in Zone V, well, 4 1/3 to 4 1/2 with digital, never mind the blown out sky. But that would be a deliberate choice. Generally it would take no more than 1 1/2, 2 or at most 3 stops of overexposure, and the sky can be fixed later, to a degree.

 

Kind regards, Wim