New to photography and needs help! (1 Viewer)

Hi all! First time poster and photographer! Well my iphone camera just wasn't cutting it so after doing research on this forum I went and got me a used SX40. I set AV to C1 and TV to C2 with settings from the good people of these forums. I took it out Sunday for the first time to try it out and came face to face with (what I'm concluding to be) a Cooper's hawk!

When I took the picture I used the zoom and tried to center the hawk just right and not being able to keep the camera steady I cut off the tail, which from my googling research, is the best way to tell between a Cooper's and a Sharp Shinned hawk.

So my first question is- Would it be best to take a picture with less zoom to make sure to get the whole bird in the picture then zoom and crop later? Or was I just too slow and need more practice and better technique?

On the bright side, he jumped to the other side of the tree and I managed to get what I think is a pretty good shot!

Second question- How do I resize the pictures to add them to the posts?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibleep/14156181037/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibleep/14156018049/

Hi and welcome.

I've had an SX40 for two years, and it's good at offering a lot in a small package, and it seems you've quickly discovered some of its limitations. Less zoom is one answer, and being patient before pressing the button is another - the lens and its IS can take time settling leading to what I guess happened in your shot of the hawk.

I resize my images in a very old version of Photoshop, PS6. i.e. <Image, Image Size> with "Constrain Proportions" and "Resample Image" both enabled. Both sizing boxes have the "Pixels" option selected.

HTH

There's no single answer to your first question. I use the SX50 rather than SX40 but I'm suspect the same applies. Generally for bird photos optical zoom is at maximum and most often I use the built in 1.5x converter for stills. Canon reckon the converters give better results than using the digital zoom and I've found the same myself.

If you're close enough to pretty much fill the frame with the optical zoom then just use that. However I generally find I get better results by using the 1.5x converter to fill the frame a little more and then crop/resize on the computer rather than simply cropping an image taken with just the 50x optical zoom.

Photos are added to posts using the file attachment button below the text box. When replying to an existing thread use the post reply button rather then the quick reply box as that enables the attachment feature. The file size limits are listed when you're ready to add a photo.

For processing a good freebie download program is Picassa. You can crop, make adjustments and resize photos using the export function where you can adjust compression/file size. Plus it helps organise photos on your computer.

I think I got it

Here's the other one

Here it is. Working on a trablet without my glasses!

Great results :t: