Back from vacation, Shore Birds for C&C

benlonghair · Sep 9, 2009

Greetings everyone. Been on vacation for the past few days and was lucky enough to get a chance to shoot a Great Blue Heron for about two hours. Some of the shots came out pretty nice.

I'm still attempting to ID the other bird, if anyone knows what it is, I'd greatly appreciate knowing.

Click for EXIF data.

(Notice dinner down in the water in the background of this shot

)

Tee_bird · Sep 9, 2009

One thing to keep in mind when photographing wildlife, is to not cut any of their parts off.

I absolutely love the last one, and I think the second one would be much stronger if you cropped it a bit.

WhatBird | identify birds | bird identification guide | north america I also found this website to help identify the bird. I haven't had any luck yet, but maybe you will!

EDIT: It appears to be a Green Heron.

benlonghair · Sep 10, 2009

Thanks. I think I can probably come up with one or two that don't cut off any parts. Thanks for the ID.

Anybody else?

syphlix · Sep 10, 2009

first one the background is distracting to me cuz the top of it lines up right w the beach

2nd one looks nice... i think i would have cropped it below the dark band on the rocks though.. looks soft also...

3rd one focus looks off...

Dagwood56 · Sep 10, 2009

I think the other bird might be a "green heron" but I'm not sure.

benlonghair · Sep 10, 2009

syphlix said:
looks soft also...

3rd one focus looks off...

I've noticed this. Every shot seems to be a little off. But when I search through the image, there's nothing in better focus than the subject. It's irritating.

This one seems to be the sharpest of the bunch, and it's still not as sharp as I'd like it. At what point does it become lens softness?

300mm, f/8, 1/160th (kinda slow...)

robertwsimpson · Sep 10, 2009

use a wider aperture and up the shutter speed. you'll get stuff that looks more like this:

robertwsimpson · Sep 10, 2009

you'll probably also want to turn your ISO down some, since the noise tends to take away a little from the sharpness that you can get.

robertwsimpson · Sep 10, 2009

also, I disagree with the "not cutting anything off" rule. some of my best pictures don't show the entire animal.

benlonghair · Sep 11, 2009

robertwsimpson said:
use a wider aperture and up the shutter speed. you'll get stuff that looks more like this:

you'll probably also want to turn your ISO down some, since the noise tends to take away a little from the sharpness that you can get.

Yeah, this lens is a trade off. Either I go wide open and get the ugliest bokeh you've ever seen and lose sharpness or I shoot at ~f/8 and get a decently sharp shot and no bokeh at all in this case.

I'd love to go out and get a 300 2.8 but that's not really an option right now.

I kept the ISO up so that I could keep shutter speed up at least a little since I was shooting hand held in very cloudy conditions.

EDIT: I also have to wonder how far away from that bird you were (and how far from the bird the background was) to get that bokeh. I was limited to about 20' cause I was on a jetty with a very quick outgoing tide that I did NOT want to fall into (being swept out to sea was not the way I wanted to end my vacation).

robertwsimpson · Sep 11, 2009

lol I'd say I was about 15-20 feet away from the bird, and the BG was way off in the distance. A happy accident that the bird landed on the hand railing very close to me. I've seen bokeh like yours before, and I think it might be the product of over-sharpening. At least, in my own experience, that's what happened. I'm not sure about yours. The best thing you can do for bird pics is go on a very sunny day. for them to turn out well, you need low ISO, low fstop, and FAST shutter speeds. I'm talking about ~ 1/1000. with even the smallest twitch of you or the bird you will lose detail. especially at 300mm. and that is killer for bird photography, since you want to capture feather detail and such. if you want to try again, make sure that it's super sunny, and then try the settings I mentioned. I'll bet you'll love the results.

robertwsimpson · Sep 11, 2009

I had a go at a little PP on that picture... hope you don't mind.

benlonghair · Sep 11, 2009

Thanks for the PP. What exactly did you do? If I had to choose a part of photography that I really don't have a handle on, I'd say it's PP.

What I really should have done was hooked up my speedlight and tried that, but it was back on the beach and I didn't want to leave because I didn't know if he'd be there when I got back.

And the skydiver pic is almost no processing, definatly no sharpening. If you look at flickr, the bokeh leaves something to be desired on this lens. This is a pretty good example.

robertwsimpson · Sep 11, 2009

hm... interesting...

All I did in PPing yours was adjust the tone curve to even out the histogram a little, add some contrast, sharpen a lot, noise reduction, and then I cloned out some of the distracting water features.