Any Feedback for Improvement on in-Flight Birds? (1 Viewer)

Hi There,

This is my most recent, and one of my best in-flight shots of a Common Buzzard. They regularly circle above the woodland behind our garden but often just not close enough to grab real sharp shots.

For this particular shot, I used my D7200 and Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Di VC USD (+ monopod) @ ƒ/8.0 (this appears to be the sweet-spot), a 1/800 shutter, ISO 360 and at the zoom end of 600mm. The approx. focus distance is noted in the EXIF to be ~150m. Note i've also done some light editing in Lightroom (tone and a little sharpening).

Gallery Upload: http://www.birdforum.net/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/545860

The full EXIF can be seen here: https://flic.kr/p/BK7ktJ

My question for the audience is simply "what could i do better?". I know i'm not using top-end glass (or body for that matter) and I know this one's at long range, but in the pursuit for continuous improvement, I'd be surprised if I couldn't better this at all with the current hardware.

Many Thanks and a Happy New year.

To be honest I think you are expecting too much for the subject distance, 150mts is a long way and your pixel count per subject will be quite low for something the size of a Buzzard! Hence you photo is not very sharp!

Try the following test and compare the results. Buy a cuddly toy about the size of a Buzzard and take a photograph of it 150mts away. Then take another at 100mts, another at 50mts and one more at 25mts, I think you will see a marked improvement in IQ with each shot.

I am no expert on this but to get super pin sharp images you need to be rock steady and get as high a pixel:subject count as possible, ie. you need to get as close as you can!

I am sure someone else with more experience will be along to give some additional advice.


Shane

Cheers Shane - I really appreciate it. I think you're right and I'll give the test a go to see how I get on.

-Chris

in-flight bird at 150m? I'm impressed!

You might consider a slightly shorter exposure time. The light-colored patches on the bird's brightly-lit left side (esp. near the wingtip) are just a hair over-exposed. Matter of taste, but you can probably get the effect of more even lighting, and maybe a more dramatic rich blue sky, by underexposing a bit and then boosting the mid-tones selectively. The shorter exposure will also give you additional insurance against camera shake; maybe you can do less sharpening in that case. I'm noticing a little bit of noise in the sky - is that present in your raw image?

Thank you natreb! I'll most certainly try a longer exposure time to a) reduce blur and b) underexpose to avoid the blown-out spots. I no longer have the RAW image, but i believe the sky noise is largely down to the sharpening.

Much appreciated,

-Chris

If it's a heavy crop then IQ will take a hit, that's unavoidable. I'd say that is the single main issue here.

Use the masking function in Lightroom sharpening to reduce noise in situations like this.

I'd recommend always keeping the RAW images, especially for your better shots. If you're using Lightroom there is no reason to keep jpegs at all.