Post your best bird shots!

[JJphoto]

thanks Steve, Rick ,Joel and Denise for your kind words, really appreciate it!


Joel, the Dove picture is really cool, I really like the motion blur of the wings, also good PP work to cloned out the unwanted subject!


Andy, I like the goose with the baby picture very much! I

[Andy Stringer]

I'v noticed that your pictures have the clean looking that my picture don't have, is it because the 5D II, or there are some secret in PP?

JJ, I think you are being hard on yourself. I don't see much difference between my shots and yours in terms of how 'clean' they are. Maybe you notice it more in your full size images.

The larger sensor of the 5D II and 1D IV helps a lot with noise, but I sometimes notice pattern noise in the shadows on my 5D II. I often use a lower ISO and a longer exposure time than I really should for wildlife shots. You wouldn't normally try to shoot a flying albatross at 1/320s and I missed a lot of shots that day by trying to keep my ISO low. I know now that I don't need to worry so much about low ISO with the 5D and 1D. Where necessary, I use Lightroom 2 for noise reduction, but this often isn't required for the web. I pay more attention to noise if I'm going to be printing a shot.

I export as jpeg without resizing, with quality set to 100 and the standard amount of sharpening for screen output. I upload the full size (10-15 MB) jpeg to flickr but what you see here is a downsized version at 800 pixels wide (or 640 pixels tall for portrait shots).

[Joel Eade]

Andy, very very nice images.....that Antarctica trip looks like it was amazing. The 5D2 does well with wildlife and should be able to go to very high iso levels without much noise. I have seen plenty of shots at iso 3200 without a problem.


PS: The Male Mallards here also have the white band around the neck, I believe the one I shot was a juvenile as you suggested.

[Joel Eade]

Another Canada Goose from this past weekend .... I was shooting the birds just slowly swimming around and didn't have enough light for really high shutter speed so I was panning with this one to try to get the head sharp and it came out pretty good, but probably should have bumped the iso even more to get more speed. This bird suddenly started chasing another one and I wasn't ready for the action.


1DMKIII, 300mm 2.8L + 1.4TC, 1/100 f/5.6 iso 1000





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[Andy Stringer]

Joel, thanks for clearing up the query about the mallard. That's a fantastic action shot of the goose. I think you caught it just right as it really has a feeling of motion in the wings and feet.

I checked my archives for higher ISO shots and found this one at ISO 1000. Bonus points for anyone that can identify the species (shot in Argentina):

5D Mark II, EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM @ 400mm, f/8, 1/400s, ISO 1000, cropped.

Then there's this example at ISO 5000:

1D Mark IV, EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM @ 400mm, f/5.6, 1/1000s, ISO 5000, cropped.

The second one really needed the high shutter speed (and the 10 fps frame rate of the 1D IV). I need to get a 500mm f/4L if I'm to bring the ISO down to a reasonable level. A bit of bright sunshine would help too, but there's not much chance of that in a typical Scottish summer.

[Steve U]

I think that could be a nice example of the Argentinian yellow beaked black headed brown bird, heh heh.

[conropl]

Andy, I really like the mother goose.


Below where from this last weekend. Both where from 7D, 100-<span style="background-color: #ffffff;"]400<span style="color: #ff0000;"]L @ 400mm, f/5.6, 1/4000 sec


A couple of Love Birds


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[Joel Eade]

Andy,


That Argentinian bird has to be some kind of Robin or Thrush, I don

[Andy Stringer]

That Argentinian bird has to be some kind of Robin or Thrush

I think that's as close as anyone is likely to get to the right answer. It's a Magellanic Thrush, a subspecies of the Austral Thrush.

[JJphoto]

JJ, I think you are being hard on yourself.

well i guess i just didn't know how to express what i felt, it seems like it(the clean looking) is related to the noise level after reading your reply.

I export as jpeg without resizing, with quality set to 100 and the standard amount of sharpening for screen output. I upload the full size (10-15 MB) jpeg to flickr but what you see here is flickr's downsized version at 640 pixels wide. That way, this site doesn't need to re-size the image again.

that's a good tip, thank you Andy!