Post your best bird shots!

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Originally Posted by Sinh Nhut Nguyen

There was no blinkies on the belly of the fish, but it does look overexposed, what do you think?

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Nate


I think its a great capture and looks good. Even if it is overexposed would you have had time to make adjustments [:P]


The local camera store gave me tickets to an EOS Discovery Day by Canon. It was an intermediate Class, I thought it might be a waste of time as it was mostly going over how to turn functions on and off and such....But, I did glean a few ideas from the instructors. One of the instructors was talking about Highlight Tone Priority. The instructors said that many birders use this function, to get more detail out of the blacks and whites on the bird. I just wondered if you enable that function on your's, and what your thoughts were.


Rick

Thanks HDNitehawk, Highlight Tone Priority is always turned on.


I've been using Auto ISO quite often now, most of the time it is accurate, once in a while it overexposes my image,and I've never experienced underexposed image when Auto ISO is on.

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Snow Cardinal. I think I'm getting better at this bird stuff. I need to work on a more aesthetically pleasing perch now and am going to try to mount some flashes off the side of the deck to get my shutter speed up a little. It was snowing pretty hard during this picture so disregard the snow blur. Advice other than buy a better camera or lens is always appreciated. Canon 40D, 300mm, f4, 1/200s, iso 320.

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Originally Posted by Sinh Nhut Nguyen

I've been using Auto ISO quite often now, most of the time it is accurate, once in a while it overexposes my image,and I've never experienced underexposed image when Auto ISO is on.

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After reading one of Bryan's reviews I started using the Auto ISO as well several weeks back. I have had the 7D for a few months, but I didn't realize it could do this because the 5D wouldn't. This method seems to be doing fine and is the best I have used so far. I go to manual mode, pick the aperture and shutter speed that I like and then balance it so I have the ISO in a range close to where I want it to be. Then let Auto ISO select when things start happening fast, this gives about 3 or 4 stops of range. If it stays between 100-800 I am happy. So far all the mistakes I have seen are my own because I am not fully used to it yet and I usually over expose.

dsiegel5151, nice shot! looks pretty sharp to me, maybe you cropped a little too tight IMO.

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Originally Posted by dsiegel5151

It was snowing pretty hard during this picture so disregard the snow blur.

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Wow you are really addicted.

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Originally Posted by dsiegel5151

Advice other than buy a better camera or lens is always appreciated.

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hopefully you don't think the 400mm 5.6 is a better lens than you 300mm 4.0[:D] but I do believe it's better for bird photograph.

JJphoto: thanks. Yeah, I cropped it a little too tight b/c my birdfeeder has two little concrete birds on it to the right. Hopefully I

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Originally Posted by dsiegel5151

a friend sold me hers for $700

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that was really a sweet deal! I wish I have a friend like your friend[:D]

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Originally Posted by dsiegel5151

I never really imagined that I would enjoy photographing birds so much.

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me either!

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Originally Posted by dsiegel5151

when I usually go hiking I have a macro on one body for easily caught amphibians and reptiles and a telephoto on my other body for the ones that are not so easy to catch.... if someone walked up to me tomorrow and offered an even swap of a clean 400 for my clean 300 I probably would take it.

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One big advantage of the 300mm f/4L IS over the 400mm f/5.6L (besides the IS, obviously), is the relatively close minimum focus distance. It's ~5 feet with the 300/4, resulting in 0.24x magnification, meaning it does a great job at closeup shots of small, shy critters. The 400/5.6 has an MFD of over 11 feet and a max mag of 0.12x.

White Ibis from my trip to Florida last September, taken with my 1DmkIII and a rented 500mm lens





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Joel,


Beautiful shot! I

This is a Willet, again from Florida


1DMKIII


500mm


1/1250


f/6.3


iso 400





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Beautiful Joel!


I have one more winter shot with the 70-200 & kenko set. He wasn't too far away for this one.


http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ab_NE46pN8...1_18_12120.jpg

Jayson,


good job with the exposure... you got detail to come through in the blacks and the whites ... not always easy to do. Those Kenko teleconverters are killer with that lens!

Hi Nate:


A superior capture of nature in progress.





Godspeed


Wayne

Finally got some BIF


7D ,500mm 4.0+1.4TCII


[img]/resized-image.ashx/__size/800x0/__key/CommunityServer-Discussions-Components-Files/15/8738.IMG_5F00_9904.jpg[/img]


[img]/resized-image.ashx/__size/800x0/__key/CommunityServer-Discussions-Components-Files/15/1263.IMG_5F00_9914.jpg[/img]

<span class="messageBody"]Every Year from December to mid February the California Brown Pelicans in La Jolla change into their breeding plumage colors, resulting in a bright red pouch and deep black feathers on the their necks. This event attracts wildlife photographers world/nationwide to the cliffs of La Jolla to photograph this nature wonder.

I woke up at 3<span class="text_exposed_show"]:30 and left the house at 4:30 to make it La Jolla before sunrise, when I got there it seemed like a disappoinment morning as the birds never came into view. You would see them flying in and around the area but they only hung out over the cliff. After about 4 hours my patience began to wear off, as I was about to leave, this guy came out of nowhere and landed about 40 yards from me. He started to spreen himself and give me a few poses, after about 30 minutes he got bored and decided to yawn then he took off out to open ocean. :)

200 miles round trip 5 hours of driving round trip and 4 hours of waiting for this shot...TOTALLY WORTH IT!

This is the classic head throw aka yawning, and it's often unpredictable because pelicans never really tell you when they yawn :)

Check out the larger version here <span>http://photo.net/photodb/photo<wbr /><span class="word_break"]?photo_id=12479432&amp;size=lg


<span class="messageBody"]<span class="text_exposed_show"]Thanks for viewing and commenting.


<span class="messageBody"]<span class="text_exposed_show"]f/5.6, 1/2000, ISO 200


http://www.pscvn.org/members/308/1-2...7-24-11_AM.jpg

Nice shot, Nate!


I went there earlier this year and was hoping to get some shots like this, no luck.

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Canon 40D, 300mm, f7.1, 1/250s, iso 100


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Canon 40d, 300mm, f7.1, 1/400s, iso 100


[img]/resized-image.ashx/__size/700x0/__key/CommunityServer-Discussions-Components-Files/15/8750.Pelicans.jpg[/img]


Canon 40d, 300mm, f7.1, 1/800s, iso 100


[img]/resized-image.ashx/__size/700x0/__key/CommunityServer-Discussions-Components-Files/15/6840.Gull.jpg[/img]


Canon 40d, 300mm, f4, 1/1600, iso 100

Love the perched Bald Eagle .... you must have been close! This is a shot (taken from my car window today) of a Red Tailed Hawk


1DMKIII


300mm 2.8L + 1.4 TC II Hand Held


Manual mode


ISO 400


f/5.6


1/1600





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Joel, the eagles are thick where I am at this year (outside of St. Louis). I counted four flying today and seven perched. I was tracking the one pictured and he flew right over my head and landed in the woods nearby. That picture is about a 75% crop, so I wasn

nice hawk in flight, Joel!, looks pretty sharp.

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Originally Posted by Joel Eade

This is a shot (taken from my car window today)

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I usually leave the camera in the trunk when I'm driving, so I would miss this kind of shots[:)]





Today was a GBH day, here are some of the shots


7D, 500mm+1.4X TC, f6.3, 1/2000, ISO 1000


http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/3489/img9973d.jpg


f6.3,1/2000,ISO 2000


http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/3720/img9951o.jpg


f6.3,1/2000,ISO 800


http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/2614/img9966i.jpg


thanks for viewing!

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Nice GBH shots! I like the last one best. Here's another Common Tern from my trip to Florida last Sept.


1/2000


f/8


iso 400


500mm





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JJ that last photo is fantastic mate. Great separation, colours, focus and framing. Good stuff. That 500mm is an amazing piece of glass (not that the lens makes the shot, that

thanks, btaylor, really appreciate your compliment.


yes, that 500mm4.0(well, 90% of the time it was a 700mm 5.6) proofs that more reach makes a lot difference.

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anyone knows the name of this bird?thank you

I don't know the name of my bird either. just no time to figure that out[:)]


I got this one today, have never seen this one before, I like it's color very much.


7D ,700mm 5.6, f5.6,1/1250, ISO 1250, there are some noise in the shadow, I wish I used fill light.


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the pictures I posted here looked less contrast than the one in my computer. I have been having this problem, does anybody know how to fix that? thanks !

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Originally Posted by JJphoto

the pictures I posted here looked less contrast than the one in my computer. I have been having this problem, does anybody know how to fix that? thanks !

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I was having a problem uploading to the site then posting, the pictures never looked as good. I upload mine to flickr now and just attach the url for the photo. I do not resize it when I upload, I do the whole file. Then when I attach the URL i take the entries out of the max width and height box.

JJphoto ... I think you have a Glossy Ibis here.


I agree with you that uploading to this site seems to adversely affect sharpness and contrast .... I usually will make my uploads 800 pixels wide and then intentionally boost the contrast and sharpening more than I ordinarily would ... I save these images in a file named "Web Images".


Joel

joel and JJ, I had that same question one time. Click the following link to see what Daniel Browning said about it:


community.the-digital-picture.com/.../41672.aspx

This is an immature Glossy Ibis I took in Florida


1DMKIII


500mm + 1.4TC


1/1250


f/5.6


iso 400





[img]/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Discussions-Components-Files/15/3463.343V1025.jpg[/img]

I am using RGB color space, but the problem I see mostly is a decrease in sharpness ... to get my uploads to look adequately sharp I have to over-sharpen them on my monitor (MacBook Pro) prior to uploading them.

Don

thank you guys very much for the help!


I do use sRGB for CS5, DPP and my imac monitor, so I guess the problem might be the firefox I use. so I went to the Safari, the image looked a lot better than it

Unless the program can use Adobe RGB they will look dull, I use Adobe RGB becuase I can see more nuances in the color, looks sharper and has more deitail. I just make sure everything I use is set to Adobe RGB, I post everything on the TDP in Adobe RGB and they look fine.


John.

here is another picture of ibis( thanks Joel) I took yesterday.


this time I unchecked the box of "Embed Color Profile: Adobe RGB(1998)" when trying to saved as Jpeg and resized to 1600 of width and uploaded to imageshake.com


what I see now is that the sharpness seems right, but the color contrast is lesser. I also found it seemed like the lose of contrast happened right after saving to jpeg. is it normal and should I check or uncheck that box when saving the image and maybe should I save as another format like TIFF?


http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/6968/img9943r.jpg





edit, this time both pictures in firefox and in Safari look almost the same(same color and sharpness)








I compared web pictures with the one in CS5 again, maybe it's not the contrast, it's just the color that in CS5 looked much warmer,

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Originally Posted by JJphoto

here is another picture of ibis( thanks Joel) I took yesterday.

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You have had some pics that looked very good lately. Has something changed? Are you Post Processing differently now?


Or does this one bird have you stumped.


To me this pic seems like it has a little noise or something else going on. Maybe over sharpened to.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

You have had some pics that looked very good lately. Has something changed? Are you Post Processing differently now?

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thank you Rick for the kind words. you are right, several things have changed especially after I got the 500mm, more reach makes a lot of difference, 500mm with 1.4 TC need a lot of light to keep faster shutter speed, the only way to do that is to push the ISO higher, this makes me pay more attention on getting the "best exposure". I'v also learned a lot of tricks in this forum, like the setting of highlight tone from you and auto ISO from Nate and PP in CS5 and many other things from Joel and other people...... thanks guys and I love this forum.


about the PP, I mainly use the way Joel taught us before, like using layer and layer mask to reduce the noise, I also bought a book"photoshop CS5 for Nature photographers" by Ellen Anon and her son Josh Anon, I think this book also helped me a lot to understand the PP.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

To me this pic seems like it has a little noise or something else going on. Maybe over sharpened to.

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yes you are right, there is some noise in certain area, that area was shadow area that I used "shadows/highlights" to brightened it up. that proofs how important to push the histogram to the left to( but not clip it) reduce the noise. and that also makes me want to learn how to use fill light later.


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this is the unprocessed one with ISO 1600, auto white balance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JJphoto

thank you Rick for the kind words. you are right, several things have changed especially after I got the 500mm, more reach makes a lot of difference, 500mm with 1.4 TC need a lot of light to keep faster shutter speed, the only way to do that is to push the ISO higher, this makes me pay more attention on getting the "best exposure". I'v also learned a lot of tricks in this forum, like the setting of highlight tone from you and auto ISO from Nate and PP in CS5 and many other things from Joel and other people...... thanks guys and I love this forum.


about the PP, I mainly use the way Joel taught us before, like using layer and layer mask to reduce the noise, I also bought a book"photoshop CS5 for Nature photographers" by Ellen Anon and her son Josh Anon, I think this book also helped me a lot to understand the PP.

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Of course if all else fails drop back to what works.


I understand what your saying about the 7D with the 500mm and fighting to get light. With the 1.4 TC its going to be even worse. I had gotten used to getting close to what I was shooting, with the crop factor of the 7D I found myself to close to get enough DOF sometimes. The first thing I did when I got the 1D Mark IV was go in and set the ISO spread from 100-1600 so it wouldn't get to high when in Auto.


Good Luck