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Can a Dslr camera take a decent pic at distance. (1 Viewer)

senatore

senatore

Well-known member
I am a bit of a novice using a DSLR camera and telephoto lens (Canon 350D/Sigma 170-500 lens) but my better pics (showing fine detail) have all been taken when the birds are quite close ( not more than 10 metres) and the results when the birds are distant have so far been disappointing even after editing/cropping.

Have you had good results when using similar equipment to mine with distant birds?If so can you post a copy and say how far away it was so I can be encouraged to persevere.


Max.
 
senatore said:
I am a bit of a novice using a DSLR camera and telephoto lens (Canon 350D/Sigma 170-500 lens) but my better pics (showing fine detail) have all been taken when the birds are quite close ( not more than 10 metres) and the results when the birds are distant have so far been disappointing even after editing/cropping.

Have you had good results when using similar equipment to mine with distant birds?If so can you post a copy and say how far away it was so I can be encouraged to persevere.


Max.
Click to expand...

I am another novice with a 300d and a Sigma 28-300 lens, I have found that I must set the focus so that only the centre spot is used and then I seem to get reasonable results. If I forget then the samllish bits in the centre are usually a bit fuzzy. If the light is good then the results are also reasonable using the athlete setting mode on the dial. The swan was taken from about 150 yds using the sports mode giving 1/2000 at f/7.1 at an ISO of 400 and the black backed gulls using the program setting using 1/640 at f/7.1 and an ISO of 200. In both pictures the birds were about 150 yds away, neither picture has been processed other than to crop and resize. Both pictures were taken at maximum zoom of 300mm.
 

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There's a distance beyond which any lens/sensor can't resolve the fine details in a bird's plumage - it'll vary with each lens/camera - and that's basically the limit of how far away you'll need to be to get a good shot.

Using a DSLR definitely changes the way you do your birding!
 
Adey Baker said:
Using a DSLR definitely changes the way you do your birding!
Click to expand...

Interesting comment Adey. I was actually thinking of starting a thread on this possibly as a 'warning' to people that in my experience Birding virtually goes out of the window.

A year ago I was happily year listing, hardly taking any photo's but walking miles, getting lots of fresh air and seeing 60-70 species on a typical saturday morning (pretty well my only free time)

Now I spend my saturday mornings hunched up in a car or hide, see a dozen species, have got permanent back ache and seem to have put on a stone in weight!

I admit that I am trying to achieve the best shots I can with the kit I've got rather than wander around getting record shots but my 'birding' has definitely changed.

Sorry for the thread hijack Max but thought it was vaguely relevent.

Regards

Paul
 
There is a finite amount of information that a sensor (or film) can record, you cannot expect to get the same feather detail on a bird that is small in frame as you would on a frame filler so the distant shots will be no less sharp at 1-1, they will just lack fine detail.
What you have to understand is that a subject at 4 X smaller in frame will have approx 16X less pixels (or grain structure on film) to record it.
So as Keith says, it is best to go for the bird in context with its surroundings in these situations.
 
bill lord said:
I am another novice with a 300d and a Sigma 28-300 lens, I have found that I must set the focus so that only the centre spot is used and then I seem to get reasonable results. If I forget then the samllish bits in the centre are usually a bit fuzzy. If the light is good then the results are also reasonable using the athlete setting mode on the dial. The swan was taken from about 150 yds using the sports mode giving 1/2000 at f/7.1 at an ISO of 400 and the black backed gulls using the program setting using 1/640 at f/7.1 and an ISO of 200. In both pictures the birds were about 150 yds away, neither picture has been processed other than to crop and resize. Both pictures were taken at maximum zoom of 300mm.
Click to expand...
Well those pics are very good at that distance.I'm encouraged.

Max.
 
paul goode said:
Interesting comment Adey. I was actually thinking of starting a thread on this possibly as a 'warning' to people that in my experience Birding virtually goes out of the window.

A year ago I was happily year listing, hardly taking any photo's but walking miles, getting lots of fresh air and seeing 60-70 species on a typical saturday morning (pretty well my only free time)

Now I spend my saturday mornings hunched up in a car or hide, see a dozen species, have got permanent back ache and seem to have put on a stone in weight!

I admit that I am trying to achieve the best shots I can with the kit I've got rather than wander around getting record shots but my 'birding' has definitely changed.

Sorry for the thread hijack Max but thought it was vaguely relevent.

Regards

Paul
Click to expand...
Hi Paul,
You make a very valid point which I had realised myself.

On Sunday I went to my local patch and deliberately left my camera at home so I could be more mobile.Well I was and visited all the hides and saw more birds than when I take the camera but from one of the hides there were very good views of a Greenshank in beautiful Summer plumage.A great shot missed.You can't win!!!!!!

Max.
 
Bill,

you say that your swan was 150 yards away.

Are you sure?

That's about one and a half times the length of a football pitch!

I don't mean to sound doubtful, but that's a hell of a frame-filler for a 300mm lens at that sort of distance...
 
Keith Reeder said:
Bill,

you say that your swan was 150 yards away.

Are you sure?

That's about one and a half times the length of a football pitch!

I don't mean to sound doubtful, but that's a hell of a frame-filler for a 300mm lens at that sort of distance...
Click to expand...

The swan takes up about 600 pixels across out of 3072, say a fifth. The nearest measure I have got says that at 10 yds the field of view is about 2 feet so that is 1/15. doing the sums on the the pixels and assuming that the swan with both wings extended spreads about 6 feet the distance is almost spot on at 150 yds. If the swan is smaller or the field of view I have measured only approximately is bigger then the distance will be smaller but I would find it difficult to come to less than 100yds and my personal estimation of the distance measured in football pitches would be somewhere between one and one and a half.
 
Max,
It's all about laying as many mpxls on your target as possible. The larger your subject is in the VF, the more detail you will capture. Also, the more shallow DOF comes into play.

With experience you will understand that there comes a point (or actually a distance) when you will likely not even bother shooting at, or beyond. You will understand that the resulting shot will probably be a 100% crop and there won't be much, if any, subject detail. In those cases, Keith R's suggestion is spot on. Do a nice composition where feather detail is not important (silohettes and the like). Unless you are listing or cataloguing, there's really not much else you can do. You can add a TC, but that just moves the distance out a bit farther. Unless you have the Hubble attached, long reach and amount of detail will always be a trade off.

Of course the larger the bird, the farther away it can be and still fill enough of the VF. Sparrows, more distant than say 25 feet are tough to capture with any detail. Large ducks, at 100 feet can show very nice detail. Ducks/hawks/egrets at 150 feet may not be worth raising your lens for.

I am sure you've heard the "I want/need more reach" refrain before. It is true. A birdshooter never has enough reach. There's always that GREAT shot you could get, or could have gotten if only you would have had a few hundred more millimeters to work with........LOL

OK, now for some meaningful information. What can you do to make these long distance shots come out as well as possible? Stabilization may help the most. A good monpod or tripod (especially when coupled with a remote) can help get the sharpest possible capture. Fast speeds and good panning technique (for fliers) will help. But the best advice is to get as close as possible. Whether that means stalking and yes even wearing camo, working from cover or a blind, or even staking out a feeder, a field, a pond or stream.

That's what makes this type of photography so challenging and enjoyable. If you could just walk right up to a rare bird and shoot a portrait, it would be something anyone could do and pretty boring at that. You might as well go to the zoo or a petstore....lol

There's no fun in that, right? ;-)


Have a good one Max,
Steve
 
Bill,

I won't argue with the maths ('cos I stink at maths!) but in my limited experience 300mm won't give you that much detail/scale at 150 yards - I'd expect little more than a vaguely swan shaped white smudge...

Without putting words into his mouth, Steve's posting above seems to pick up on this point. He says:

Ducks/hawks/egrets at 150 feet may not be worth raising your lens for.
Click to expand...

If 150 feet is a real world cut-off, 150 yards is pushing it..!

;)

(No offence Bill - but as I say, this jars with my experience).
 
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SMC2002 said:
But the best advice is to get as close as possible.
Click to expand...

That's what it comes down to in the end. You have to get closer to the bird. It takes time and practice and good luck too. Doesn't matter how long your lens is - the longer the lens you use and the more you spend on it, the more important it becomes to get into a good position. You spent all that money, right? Now you have to get great shots to justify your credit card bill. And how do you get those shots? Yup: you get closer to the bird.
 
SMC2002 said:
Max,
It's all about laying as many mpxls on your target as possible. The larger your subject is in the VF, the more detail you will capture. Also, the more shallow DOF comes into play.

With experience you will understand that there comes a point (or actually a distance) when you will likely not even bother shooting at, or beyond. You will understand that the resulting shot will probably be a 100% crop and there won't be much, if any, subject detail. In those cases, Keith R's suggestion is spot on. Do a nice composition where feather detail is not important (silohettes and the like). Unless you are listing or cataloguing, there's really not much else you can do. You can add a TC, but that just moves the distance out a bit farther. Unless you have the Hubble attached, long reach and amount of detail will always be a trade off.

Of course the larger the bird, the farther away it can be and still fill enough of the VF. Sparrows, more distant than say 25 feet are tough to capture with any detail. Large ducks, at 100 feet can show very nice detail. Ducks/hawks/egrets at 150 feet may not be worth raising your lens for.

I am sure you've heard the "I want/need more reach" refrain before. It is true. A birdshooter never has enough reach. There's always that GREAT shot you could get, or could have gotten if only you would have had a few hundred more millimeters to work with........LOL

OK, now for some meaningful information. What can you do to make these long distance shots come out as well as possible? Stabilization may help the most. A good monpod or tripod (especially when coupled with a remote) can help get the sharpest possible capture. Fast speeds and good panning technique (for fliers) will help. But the best advice is to get as close as possible. Whether that means stalking and yes even wearing camo, working from cover or a blind, or even staking out a feeder, a field, a pond or stream.

That's what makes this type of photography so challenging and enjoyable. If you could just walk right up to a rare bird and shoot a portrait, it would be something anyone could do and pretty boring at that. You might as well go to the zoo or a petstore....lol

There's no fun in that, right? ;-)


Have a good one Max,
Steve
Click to expand...
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your reply.You make a great point that if it was easy to take a great pic it would not be as rewarding as it is now which for me is very hard indeed.

Max.
 
Keith Reeder said:
Bill,

I won't argue with the maths ('cos I stink at maths!) but in my limited experience 300mm won't give you that much detail/scale at 150 yards - I'd expect little more than a vaguely swan shaped white smudge...
Click to expand...

I was a maths teacher so I know the maths is correct, I'm also a very novice bird photographer, and the swans were taken at Martin Mere on my first trip out with the lens. I had absolutely no idea what I could get or what I could not get. I think it was more pure luck than anything else, I panned the camera on a small flight of swans coming in towards the back of the pool from the Swan link hide whilst allowing the camera to take pictures as quickly as it could. I was amazed at the pictures I got. But the distances are a minimum of 100 yds assuming that all my calculations work out on the wrong side, and being a place I frequent regularly the distances are reasonably fixed in my mind. What I will do sometime is to put a measure out at 10 yds and check the actual width of the field of view from a photograph and then do a recalculation, my only problem then would be estimating the width of the swan from one wingtip to the other.
The two black backed gulls were taken from the front at Arnside and they were midstream at a lowish tide, someone else may be able to estimate those distances.
 
Best way to estimate distance, I find, is to think in terms of cricket pitches. If you can (or used to be able to!) drop a leg-cutter onto a good length, there is your 22 yards, which is close enough to 20 metres as makes no difference. Works for me.

Mind you, I was an accurate, nagging sort of off-spinner, boring to watch but good at tying an end down, so my good length stock ball is pretty much hard-coded into my eye and my shoulder muscles. If you were a tearaway quick, bowling yorkers and bumpers with the odd wide and the odd full toss in-between wicket-taking balls, then your 22 yards might be anywhere between 10 and 30!

And if you were a batsman .... I'm not sure that it would work from the other end. I always used to find that the big left-armer with the vicious out-swinger seemed to bowl from about 10 yards away!

And if you grew up on the wrong side of the pond and never played cricket, I guess this doesn't make any sense at all to you .... but a baseball pitcher stands 20 yards from home plate and the bases are 30 yards apart, so maybe picturing that distance is a useful method.
 
Actually I too have the same combination for bird photography. 350 D & Sigma 170-500. But I am doubtfull about the results. I think it is sharp upto 300 mm, but then onwards the quality is not satisfactory. Even a sparrow shot from approx. 4 meters @ 500 mm does not appear sharp. I am not sure what is wrong?
Even with tripod and self timer I have shot sample pics only to see disappointing results. I have few doubts--
1) Does 350D produce very soft pictures (even with the canon 17-55 lens)?
2) Is the lens not capable of producing sharp pics at more than 300 mm?
3) Why most bird photographers (at least those, I know) use Nikon instead of Canon?
I have waited for 8 years to have a zoom lens and SLR and now I am not happy with it. My budget does not permit me to go for any more costly equipment. Will anybody suggest me what is the problem? PLEASE.
 
Last edited:
senatore said:
I am a bit of a novice using a DSLR camera and telephoto lens (Canon 350D/Sigma 170-500 lens) but my better pics (showing fine detail) have all been taken when the birds are quite close ( not more than 10 metres) and the results when the birds are distant have so far been disappointing even after editing/cropping.

Have you had good results when using similar equipment to mine with distant birds?If so can you post a copy and say how far away it was so I can be encouraged to persevere.


Max.
Click to expand...

Hi,
I could be wrong and am prepared for the consequences (!)but think you also have to factor in the accuracy of the auto-focus. So, for example, shooting a swan at 10 metres gives the camera and lens a decent target to focus on. Shooting a sparrow at 10 metres doesn't. So the sparrow sized portion of the swan (say the middle 300x300 picels) is likely to be sharper than the actual sparrow (also 300x300 pixels). I hope this makes sense.

More expensive cameras have larger numbers of focus points which themselves are smaller and more accurate (I think the 1 series has 45 points vs 9 for the 20D and 350D.) The problem is exasberated with longer lenses which have narrow DOF, so a 2 cm error in focusing (only 0.2 % at 10 m) makes a big difference on a 400 mm lens at f5.6 but much less on a 300 mm lens at 5m.

I'm glad you raised this as I was also considering it due to the relatively poor quality of some of my small bird shots. it's nice to know I'm not alone.

cheers,
Richard

ps I'm ignoring dof on the swan and sparrow for simplicity !
 
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