My first attempt @ Wildlife shooting - Kindly Comment

[tzuoh]

Hi All,

Finally, I managed to find time to use the vintage Takumar 4/300 prime lens given by a friend many months back.

It is the old Takumar manual lens with 18 blades for M42 mount. I did struggled using it due to it's heavy weight and manual focusing. At 300m focal length, I found that I had difficulties in reaching smaller birds :-(

Attached please find some of my shots today. All subjects were taken from quite a distance using AV; 4/5.6; Auto-ISO, hence, I cropped the images heavily & did some minor PP.

To be honest, I wasn't satisfy with the images; I believe it was mainly due to my settings/skills rather than the LENS itself.


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All criticisms and advices are most welcome.

It's indeed a challenging for bird shooting but I will go for it ....... hope to brush up my skills & get the right gears in the near future.
Thank you.

Regards

 

[TCD photography]

I'm an amateur, so take this with a grain of salt...CC, as requested:

1. Pretty bird (what is it?). Blurry, due to slow shutter speed and camera shake - almost looks like it was taken out of an old window.
2. This one's my favorite out of the set. A little over sharpened, but not too bad.
3. Some ISO noise, but overall nice.
4. Holy sharpness, Batman! Do you know what ISO the camera chose for this one? Way over sharpened.
5. Slightly blurred, but I like how its tilting its head looking for a potential meal.

Just my $0.02, hope this helped!

 

[molested_cow]

You missed the focus on some of them. Are you using a cropped sensor camera? Some of them also have noticeable CA issues. Otherwise, framing is excellent!

 

[tzuoh]

Hi TCD;
Thank you for your comment, truly appreciated.
1. I believe it was a Stork-billed Kingfisher; Yes, it was taken @dusk hour, shady & low light situation. I had to fire the external flash@1/180 & almost w/ no focusing. It was a handheld shot.
2. Relatively new in PP, still learning to use Element v9
3. Yes, I did noticed the noise
4. ISO was@200. I believe I've done something wrong w/ the noise program
5. Yes... it wasn't sharp.

Regards;

 

[tzuoh]

Hi Molested_cow;
Thank you for your comment.
Yes, I agree that the images were out-of-focus and I wasn't too happy with the end-result.
I am using Pentax K-x and it uses 1.5 crop sensor
Yes, I noticed the CA too, I did read some postings on the net about CA issue w/ the Takumar 4/300 lens but I could be wrong.

Regards;