This was an experimental shot....I used my 40D + 500mm f/4L + 2X TC II for a total effective focal length of 1600mm !!!
The 40D will not autofocus with this combination so I used live view and manually focused. This Cardinal was about 30 yards away in low light
ISO 1600 f/8 1/160 in AV mode, no flash. If you zoom in it's pretty noisy and probably would not make a good large print but for internet viewing it's not too bad considering I was using manual focus high and very high iso for the 40D.
1600mm and 1600ISO on a 40D, that is still a pretty sweet image Joel and I imagine, opens a world of possibilities for you.
Steve U
Wine, Food and Photography Student and Connoisseur
Very nice indeed, Joel!! Man, I would be in heaven with that set-up!!
I could never get that clarity with my 40D at ISO 1600. In fact, I'd cringe everytime I had to go to ISO 800. Well done
OK, i've spent waaaay too much time on this photo today, got too much work to do before xmas, and I haven't even put any clothes on or had breakfast yet. And it's 2pm.
Anyway, HDRed 3 shots +/-1EV, tried a few different algorithms for making the .exr, then another few algorithms for tonemapping with way too many options.
Finally I got one I liked, well, almost, took it to GIMP and adjusted the curves.
Then selected all but the bird and in-focus foreground stick/branch it was sitting on (GIMP has no smart select like PS, so it was a lot of fuzzy-select and deselect by colour), then did a 5px Gaussian Blur to the background, and finally a 0.5px Gaussian Blur to de-noise (although I think I should have done that before selecting, live and learn), then cropped and shrunk.
I'd say i'm getting good at this, but that depends if the final product is worthwhile.
At least I'm getting faster.
(and why not, i'll post the original uncropped unHDRed 0EV jpg for the hell of it...)
(I suppose if I could get a nicer longer faster lens I could get some sweet shots like Joel's with a lot less effort...)
An awful lot of electrons were terribly inconvenienced in the making of this post.
Gear Photos
Thanks Steve, Denise and Don....Originally Posted by Don Burkett
this arrangement is usable only for birds that are relatively still....without autofocus using live view is almost impossible with a littel bird jumping around quickly.
I am going to try the same lens combo with my 1D3, it will autofocus but I expect it to be very slow doing it. Also the percieved "reach" won't be as great since it is 1.3 crop factor.
Hopefully I can try it this week. Mostly I wanted to know if I could get adequate sharpness using the 2X TC
This was a sharpness test using 1D3 + 500mm + 2x TC II at ISO 1600 from about 15 feet away, I had trouble keeping the whole bird in the frame but it seems at least my version of the 2X TCII is sharp enough to produce good images. The autofocus however is painfully slow so little hyperactive birds are not easy.
High ISO test
1D3
500mm + 1.4 TC II
AV mode, evaluative metering
ISO 3200
f/8
1/320
580 EX + Better Beamer -2 2/3 sops
As usual----Beautiful shot Joel. I went tried to go to the BdA, but the weather wouldn't allow---freeway's were closed, but I did manage to make it to a smaller bird preserve called Ladd S. Gordan waterfowl complex. Anyway, It was snowing fairly heavily so AF wasn't cooperating with me, but I did manage to get a few:
And One I cought on the way home of a local ranch house---with some post processing of course--
Bob
Really nice set of pictures Bob!!
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