Post your best bird shots!

[conropl]

Spring is here

No it's not

Here is a Great Blue Heron doing a little hunting this morning as snow flakes fell around him (You can see the flakes in the first one).

7D, EF 100-400mm f/4-5.6L IS
1st at 400mm, f/5.6, 1/160 sec, ISO 200
2nd at 400mm, f/5.6, 1/200 sec, ISO 200


Great Blue Heron -6382 by westmichigan, on Flickr


Great Blue Heron -6429 by westmichigan, on Flickr

[Joel Eade]

Beautiful images Pat....I guess I should have said spring is here in KY but not the UP?



House Finch on Blackberry stem
1DX + 300mm f/2.8L + 2x TCIII
f/5.6
ISO 3200
1/500

[Kayaker72]

@Pat...very nice GBHs. Low angle, were you kayaking in the snow? If it makes you feel better, NH is not far behind. Today is the first day I am noticing small leaves on the roses. Everything else is still buds.

@Joel. A beauty of a shot. When's your book coming out?

[conropl]

Thanks Joel and Brant.

@Pat...very nice GBHs. Low angle, were you kayaking in the snow? If it makes you feel better, NH is not far behind. Today is the first day I am noticing small leaves on the roses. Everything else is still buds.

You have leaves... what are those

We have been talking about getting the kayaks out, but have not done so yet. These were really lazy shots... I dorve down to the boat launch to check out the lake and caught this bird out of the corner of my eye as we were driving out. So I shut the car off and started snapping pictures from the car. I waited a while because he was catching fish and I wanted a shot of a fish in it's beak, but every time he had a fish he was facing away, so I never did get the shot I wanted. He was getting a little jittery with me there so I left before he flew away and lost his productive hunting area (beside, it was getting cold in the car w/o the heater on ).

[Joel Eade]

Pat, shooting from the car works quite well in many situations here in KY as well.....many times your subject will be more comfortable around a vehicle than a person on foot. I wouldn't consider it lazy

We have lots of new leaves now as you can see the nice light green background in this shot from the back yard. I am experimenting with some new filters with Topaz Clean, Topaz Detail and Nik Color Efex Pro.....what do you think?



1DX
500mm f/4L
ISO 1000
f/6.3
1/400
580 EXII + Better Beamer at 1/16 power

[eldarhau]

Joel,
Your pictures are in general of a very high quality. I am inspired by them. Framing, colors, sharpness, DOF, bokeh etc. are normally great. It is almost as if this one is posing for you. With the light green background the picture becomes almost 3 dimensional.
Would be interesting if you could say something about how (on average) many shots you have for each keeper and also how much you crop etc.
Keep publishing!
Eldar

[Joel Eade]

Joel,
Your pictures are in general of a very high quality. I am inspired by them. Framing, colors, sharpness, DOF, bokeh etc. are normally great. It is almost as if this one is posing for you. With the light green background the picture becomes almost 3 dimensional.
Would be interesting if you could say something about how (on average) many shots you have for each keeper and also how much you crop etc.
Keep publishing!
Eldar

Thanks Eldar....as you probably know, I am shooting in my back yard set up from a tripod so I have control over the distance to my subject by setting up perches near a feeder.

Because I can control the distance I do not have to crop too much, usually I take away much less than 1/2 the full frame. While shooting I do tend to move the AF point around to frame the birds as best as possible in camera and this allows less cropping as well.

My keeper rate is not extraordinarily high mostly because I am looking for unique or interesting poses and good light along with good detail resolution. I also do not tend to use the high frame rate in the yard....I tend to wait for the right pose and shoot one or two frames and then wait some more. I feel OK if I get one or two really good shots out of 50, not because they aren't technically good but just not very interesting. I have many shots of the routine visitors to my yard so I get more and more selective over time. I sometimes will have taken less than 100 shots in 2 or 3 hours even though there is fairly constant bird traffic at the feeder and perches.

[nvitalephotography]

A Burrowing owl from this morning



A Barred owl from last week




A black neck stilt from two weeks ago

[Vern]

Nice owls Nick - I like the way you framed them.

Here's a bluebird from this morning.


5DMKIII, 600 f4L II + 1.4X III, f8, 1/500, ISO 1600, better beamer on Canon 600EX, -1 & 2/3 flash fill.

[Vern]

Another one - strongly backlit yesterday evening. Same camera details at 1/800.