Relative sharpness over 100 yards or so?

[coastalconn]

I wanted to see what my birder friends in here think. Maybe you can share some shots as well.. I think I am always expecting too much. The Tamron 200-500 calls anything over 90 meters (yards) infinity. So I'm guessing this vulture was at least 300-400 feet away. It is cropped down to a 2200 square. To me it seems a little soft, but maybe it just is what it is and short of a 500 F4 or another super expensive exotic tele it just wont get better? I go through theses stages. What are your thoughts? or similar shots to share? I know the Tammy is pretty sharp at shorter distances. It's wide open at F6.3. The Vulture wasn't flying terribly fast so I thought 1/1000th sec should freeze it pretty well...


Vulture in flight by krisinct, on Flickr

 

[CouncilmanDoug]

looking at the wings make it seem pretty sharp, I think it's perfectly acceptable sharpness for the crop

 

[Derrel]

I looked at it on flickr at 1600x pixels...seems just a teeny-tiny bit not 100% sharp on the bird' feathers and head...I am on my iMac tonight, and the monitor on this is not as good as my big monitor, but still, it seems to be lacking a little bit of acuity...seems like a combination of image "grain structure" and ***maybe*** ever-so-slight missed focus...or maybe that's all that lens can deliver at that ISO at that f/stop on that camera's sensor. I mean, when I see it at 1600x, it is not as ultra-crispo and ultra-high-resolution as I would expect could be had from,say a shot from a 600mm f/4 Nikkor shot on a 36MP body...

I dunno...missing focus by even five feet could be all this is...Looking at the primaries on the vulture, I think in that bright of light, at that bird-on-film size, that we should be able to see more "texture", more of the actual striations, in the flight primary feathers at a close crop and 1600x across. The camera and the Unsharp Maskng and re-sizing routines also have a big part in perceived "sharpness". also, environmental conditons can be a BIG issue....is that is really 300 to 400 feet, there could be some loss of acuity due to slight heat mirage and/or atmospheric particulate matter in the air.

 

[KmH]

The further the subject the more air that can cause focus sharpness issues. Add a bright sunny day, and you get air currents rising off the ground that can compound a loss of sharpness.
If there is any particulate size stuff in the air, it's gets even worse.

When the astronauts were on the Moon they found they could not judge distance very well. With no atmosphere on the Moon, sharpness doesn't diminish with distance like it does here on Earth.

So what looked to be 300-400 feet away to the astronauts turned out to be 1/2 a mile away or more.

 

[matthewo]

hmm, not sure the amount of crop percentage... like is this a 50% crop or a 100% or less? when you say 2200, I understand your saying resolution of the image, but not knowing the camera your using wouldn't know the size of the sensor mp. seems pretty sharp if its an unedited raw and cropped a bit.

im sure you know raws out of the camera are not sharpened and usually don't look super sharp when compaired to jpg files before you edit them.

here is a 100% crop from my D800, RAW straight out of the camera, used camera raw, and photoshop, but no adjustments where made, no sharping. 300mm f2.8 / 420mm wide open with tc14e ii = F4 / 100iso 1/1600 second, hand held. must have been infinity too cause my 300mm goes up to 70 feet, then infinity next. and this bird was well over 300 feet away.

here is the original, so we can see how much 100% is on a d800 lol

here is the crop 100% crop

 

[coastalconn]

Duh, I should have said I'm using a D300, so original size is roughly 4300x2900 I think. I cropped it to roughly 2200x2200 and resized it to 1600x1600 for upload. I've never figured out the 100% crop thing. I processed in LR4 and I normally leave default sharpening at 25. I set NR to 25. Normally I don't need to tinker too much with settings other than shadows and highlights. It seems the head was OOF but at 100 yards I should have had plenty of DOF. For some reason the beak seemed blown out and had a strange halo. I had the same problem with eagles a few weeks ago..

When I took this picture it was about 24 degrees and bright sun. Hard to figure out what was the air I have the lens fine tuned to +3 which is really sharp on all the songbirds I have been shooting under 50 feet. If anyone wants to play with the raw it is here.. DSC_7212.NEF

Some days I feel like once it hits infinity it is a gamble. It seems under 300 feet and it is really sharp, maybe it is just the physical limitations of my lens?

 

[matthewo]

possibly it has to do with the zoom. even the top dollar nikon 200-400 has problems at infinity with soft focus, much worse then your example in some cases. of coarse not all 200-400s do that, but thom hogan had the problem with his.

personally yes i think your lens is good, and you maybe asking it to do more then is possible. i have seen your photos, and i know your a good photographer but for the price of the lens, your photo quality rivals that of the big dog lenses, of coarse a lot of that is your skill, im sure you would do great with high end nikon glass too

 

[Derrel]

>>SNIP>> I have the lens fine tuned to +3 which is really sharp on all the songbirds I have been shooting under 50 feet. If anyone wants to play with the raw it is here.. DSC_7212.NEF

Some days I feel like once it hits infinity it is a gamble. It seems under 300 feet and it is really sharp, maybe it is just the physical limitations of my lens?

Well, you might be onto something with the comment about "under 300 feet and it is really sharp"...it might very well be that your normal working methods cause the lens to miss the focus point by maybe 50-200 feet or more, and what you're getting is just "within the depth of field" band...the micro-adjust setting that is so good at close range might also be causing a bit of an issue; "close"and "far" distances might actually be better-optimized with different settings. I dunno...the lens's focusing adjustment mechanism might be incremental from 10 meters out to 100 meters, and then get very,very "coarse", wherein a turn of say 5 degrees racks the lens from 100 meters focusing to "Infinity". Many lenses are quite tricky to get incrementally adjusted, precisely-placed focus with when focusing at long distances!!! (Macro lenses are often HORRIBLE at this, with very low levels of precision beyond 1 to 2 meters distant).

INterestingly...Thom Hogan's multi-year Nikkor 200-400 f/4 AF-S VR review faults the lens for being slightly soft at longer distances, and simply NOT good enough for wildlife, as compared with the super-telephoto primes, when used at distances of 100 yards or farther...and that is a $6,999 top-grade lens...

Nikkor 200-400mm f/4G Lens Review by Thom Hogan

here's a snippet of that wonderful review: "Sharpness: Here's where the lens baffled me. The short story is this: at close distances, the lens dazzled me with as-good-as-it-gets acuity. At long distances, not so much. I first noticed this in Denali. My shots at a beaver pond where I was able to set up in the bush quite close were superb--every hair on the beaver's back was distinct. But my shots of grizzlies, taken at an obviously longer distance, didn't show the same clarity. 30 feet (10m) and in, I loved the lens. 300 feet (100m) and out, I hated the lens. In between, well, sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't."

 

[matthewo]

also the 100% crop is just full resolution crop. not easy to do in LR really to export, but i do my 100% test crops in PS. full res. and the crop it and save, not resize. usually any resizing is going to slightly sharpen the photo, at least PS resize has a default sharpen on resize.

 

[matthewo]

im pretty sure the zoom telephoto problems with difference with close focus vs infinity focus has a lot to do with the focus elements vs where the zoom glass is located at that time. im sure its much harder to build and perfect a zoom vs a prime. its a lot of moving elements.

even my 300mm 2.8 needs AF fine tune with teleconverters and when at close distances is slightly different then when at longer distance focus difference. IMO more focus correction is needed on infinity.

 

[coastalconn]

Interesting about the 200-400. I've often wondered about af fine tune at min vs infinity. I will have to experiment some more when I have some light. Just have to figure out a good test thing at 400 feet or so. I figured out the 100% crop thing. I was going through some heron pictures from November trying to figure it out. I thought my AF fine tune was 0 or -1 at this point, as I had just gotten my lens back from tamron. The odd thing is exif said AF fine tune was unknown with a code like o8bc... Anyways this heron is a 100% crop now that I figured it out. I just loaded it in LR with default settings saved as a jpeg and cropped PS. Thanks for everyone's thoughts, some very interesting info...