Deer C&C

[tjones8611]

Went out this weekend in an attempt to take a few photos of some deer. I had a hard time with the focus, not sure why.

 

[hankejp]

Besides being not in focus, which you addressed already, they look to have some noise on them. Not sure what ISO you were shooting with. To me, they might also be a little overexposed. On some of the pictures, the buck picture in particular, you should have had the Buck more to the left and leave some open space on the right. Not sure if that made snse or not.

Keep clicking and most of all have fun...

 

[mrodgers]

First off, what camera? To me, they look like they were taken with a very poor quality camera, or a poor quality cell phone camera. Sometimes it's the photographer and sometimes it's just someone wondering why photos look bad when they don't know anything about photography or cameras and are plain old using crappy equipment.

 

[tjones8611]

I was using a Canon Xs with Canon 70-300mm, and a 1.6 teleconverter. I took them inside of my truck, leaning out the window. Not sure why they all turned out so poorly, even without the TC, they did not look sharp. The first two were taken w/o the converter.

 

[WimFoto]

often with zoom lenses they loose a lot of optical quality at maximum zoom, this could be the case here.

 

[Gaerek]

I'm assuming these were hand held then. The general rule of thumb for hand holding a shot is that the shutter speed should be the reciprocal of the focal length. But this only works with 35mm equivalent.

If you were at 300mm, with a 1.6 teleconverter, shooting with an XSi, you have a 35mm equivalent focal length of 768mm. This means your shutter speed should be at least 1/1000 of a second if you want to have a chance at a sharp capture. I don't remember offhand what the aperture of that lens is at 300mm, but I'm guessing with the TC on there, it was pretty dark. To keep your shutter speed up, you would need to bump up the ISO, which would introduce noise, but would likely allow you to get a sharper picture.

There's also the chance that you did all this anyway. EXIF would be useful in this case, but I suspect that your shutter was too slow. My main evidence of this is your last shot of the buck running away. There's considerable motion blur in the background and on the buck. If you were shooting at 1/1000 I think there would be considerably less blur.