Hawk in the City

[tmbroe01]

Notice this guy on campus today. Luckily I had my camera with me.

This is probably the best out of the bunch.

Here's a second that I attempted to save.

Here's the original, which needed a lot of work.

 

[Jim Stafford]

Do me a favor and see what you can do with my poor eagle shots in my blurry thread. Maybe I just need to learn hot to PP properly.

 

[Montana]

Exposure goes a long ways. The first has the bird exposed fairly well. The whites on his chest are slightly blown. If the sun were to your back or so It would have been way easier to expose more of the scene. I replied to your Eagle thread (I think it was yours anyways). But now I see that your focus appears decent. The third shot says f/4.5. Too wide! Stop that lens down to 6.3, 7.1, 8, or more. You don't need 1/1250 sec for a sitting bird. That will give you not only more depth of field, but also get that lens down into the sweet spot. Are you shooting JPEG only? The EXIF says sharpness is set to soft? Adjust some in camera parameters if you are shooting JPEG only.

 

[Montana]

And on another note, I am assuming this is with the 150-400 or which ever lens? If so, why is it shot at 150mm? The background is less than interesting and I see no reason to include a lot of it. Flip that camera on its side (portrait) and rack that lens out there ane capture some detail! Most of all, practice.

 

[tmbroe01]

Do me a favor and see what you can do with my poor eagle shots in my blurry thread. Maybe I just need to learn hot to PP properly.

Well I took a look at your thread, and it seems you have a focusing problem with your images. I tried my hand at attempting to sharpen them, but it actually made them worse, so I won't bother posting them. The lighting and exposure of your pictures is decent, but they're very much out of focus. Unfortunately, while post processing is good for tweaking the lighting, exposure and color of an image, there's not much that can be done for something that's out of focus. Sharpening only works well for images that are already in focus or just slightly out of focus, or if there is a slight blur due to camera shake.

You might want to try shooting while manually focusing, to see if the problem is merely your camera's auto focus. I know I dislike the job my camera's autofocuser does, so I shoot almost entirely in manual (those hawk pictures were taken with manual focus).

Sorry I can't be of more help.

 

[tmbroe01]

Exposure goes a long ways. The first has the bird exposed fairly well. The whites on his chest are slightly blown. If the sun were to your back or so It would have been way easier to expose more of the scene. I replied to your Eagle thread (I think it was yours anyways). But now I see that your focus appears decent. The third shot says f/4.5. Too wide! Stop that lens down to 6.3, 7.1, 8, or more. You don't need 1/1250 sec for a sitting bird. That will give you not only more depth of field, but also get that lens down into the sweet spot. Are you shooting JPEG only? The EXIF says sharpness is set to soft? Adjust some in camera parameters if you are shooting JPEG only.

And on another note, I am assuming this is with the 150-400 or which ever lens? If so, why is it shot at 150mm? The background is less than interesting and I see no reason to include a lot of it. Flip that camera on its side (portrait) and rack that lens out there ane capture some detail! Most of all, practice.

I think your confusing me with Jim, I didn't post the eagle shots, but the above shots of the hawk are mine. The reason I shot at 150mm is that is the highest zoom lens I have, and the reason I used an aperture of 4.5 was to keep the background blurred out (I shoot aperture priority, so I don't care what my shutter speed is, as long as it isn't too slow).

I agree with you that the lighting was poor, it's too bad I didn't have a better angle at it. For the highlights on the chest, I don't think there's anything else I could have done (at that angle) without underexposing the rest of him.

I shoot Raw +JPEG so the original image is the jpeg from my camera, whereas my edited image I touched up the exposure and saturation of the Raw image and then applied some selective sharpening to make the hawk pop out a bit better.

 

[Montana]

Oooppps, I see my upper post was referring to someone elses Eagle shots. LOL Darn its getting late. Sorry about the confusion.

 

[tmbroe01]

Oooppps, I see my upper post was referring to someone elses Eagle shots. LOL Darn its getting late. Sorry about the confusion.

Pfft, don't worry about it, was just straightening it out. :thumbup:

 

[nickfmc]

hope you don't mind but I had a go at the second image. Thought you were getting a bit of a purple sky fringe on your background and the blue was changing to a bit of wierd tone. good grab on the first one!! I hate when you miss those ones cause you don't have your camera!

if you like it i'll send you the PSD if not sorry for screwing with your pic