Post your best bird shots!

[Joel Eade]

Nate,


Nice shot of the Tern & chick,


the only thing I see is perhaps a loss of detail in the blacks (hard to expose for blacks and whites at the same time though!)


Also I would evict the stone in the left lower corner


Joel

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

thanks for the comments guys,


JOel, you are right, I lost it big time, that's the thing about this shot, that's why I haven't postedit in a year.

[Joel Eade]

Royal Tern, Alafia River Florida


EOS 1D MKIII


500 f/4L IS USM


Tripod with gimbal head


1/2000 sec


f/8


iso 400


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[JJphoto]

Nice flying and action shot, Joel, with f 8.0, the whole bird , tip to tip is in focus, that's very nice. I'v never used f8 for my Bif shots, will give it a try, next time.


yeah, 1D body and 500mm is tempting.[:P]

[Joel Eade]

JJphoto


I rented the 500 from Lensrentals.com and really hated to ship it back.....it's a VERY NICE piece of gear, I would love toone of my ownbut I'll have to wait awhile. (I'm hopeful the new 600 will weigh in like the current 500)


BTW....you might know this already....those camera settings were derived by using the Sunny 16 Rule... a neat little trickto help us expose the whites on a sunny day :


Start with f/16 ISO 200 1/200 sec then any combination that gives the same amount of exposure will work fora sunny day.


for example : if you drop the f stop to f/11 that will let in twice as much light so you have to change the shutter to 1/400 or reduce the iso one stop,


you can calculate any permutation needed to get the settings necessary for the shots you are making. You have to keep checking the histogram as the light changes just to verify that the whites aren't being blown out.


if you suddenly see a dark colored bird or an all whte bird a little quick exposure compensation may be needed but those basic rules work very well.


Joel

[JJphoto]

(I'm hopeful the new 600 will weigh in like the current 500)

yes, I hope that too, when I saw your tri-colored heron picture, I could feel the power of longer focal length, IS and steady hands but for me 500mm is better if they can reduce it to about 6lbs.

BTW....you might know this already....those camera settings were derived by using the Sunny 16 Rule... a neat little trickto help us expose the whites on a sunny day :

yes, I'v read about that, but I usually go with the fastest or one stop slower f number, so most of the time, the wing tips were blurred especially shooting bigger birds. thanks for emphasizing that.


BTW, do you use Av mode or M mode?, also, what kind of metering system you usually use? thanks, Joel.

[Joel Eade]

I use manual mode 99% of the time and I have my cameraset toevaluative metering mode all the time.

[JJphoto]

I use manual mode 99% of the time and I have my cameraset toevaluative metering mode all the time.
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thanks Joel!

[ddt0725]

Where I live, seeing a blue heron is rare so I was very happy to get these shots today! [] There not great but I'll keep them for now ...until the next time I see one!

[JJphoto]

Denise, those shots are not too bad, having a great shot of GBH is not that easy if you don't see them very often. GBH is one of my favorite bird to shoot, but they are very shy at least in my area, and compare to the egrets, they don't show up very often.





here is one of my egret shot taken recently


7D, 300mm 2.8, AV mode, f2.8, 1/125, spot metering -1/3, ISO 400, 30' after sunset, tripod.


thanks for viewing!