New birds and BIFS from central NJ

largelylivin

I've spent alot of time chasing eagles lately and letting everything else pile up. For your viewing pleasue and critique. All Pentax K20D with DA*300. Some with Tamron 1.4 TC.

Don't you just love GBH's? They are so photogenic and fun to watch. Courting season has started here and we're seeing 2-4 at a time. Glad they don't migrate.










My best GBH BIF ever.



A common merganser (male). Alot of these are around now. I never saw one before winter.






A Red-Tailed Hawk (white phase - really!). For once, he was actually too close hence the wing clip.





Finally, this last one isn't my best picture ever, but it is perhaps my hardest earned. King-Fisher's are little rockets that don't fly in a straight line. Autofocus is a waste of time with these guys.

bfjr

Good Stuff
and I feel your pain in the Last one :cry

dlplumer

I like 2. 3 and 4 the best. 5-8 have quite a bit of noise. Not sure why.

largelylivin

I usually shot at 400 max. 5-8 were at 800 because of the gloomy day. THe Pentax is not so great at 800 and above.

largelylivin

Also, the King Fisher is hugely cropped.

Harryb

The GBH captures are excellent especially #2 and #4

The highlights on the first GBH are blown. I would have tried a negative EV adjustment.

You have some haloing around the merganser BIF capture. Nice capture BTW. I haven't been able to get a decent BIF of one of those guys yet. That's probably due to your post sharpening . You might want to try selective sharpening.

With the nosie on some of the other captures you might want to apply NR to the backgrounds only.

largelylivin

Thanks Harry,

The halos are due to NR and sharpening. When I've got something special, i.e. art quality, I sometimes use a heavy NR on the background and lighter NR on the subject. The Merganser and Kingfisher didn't seem to warrant the effort.

I default my EV to +1/2 and set DRANGE to 200% to try and avoid the low ev noise. My problem is that I either don't have time to readjust, especially on BIFS, or I just plain forget. Still in training.