some practice with Hawks

pmaxwell

I took some time today to practice with birds and went looking for some Hawks. Found one semi-cooperative bird.

I'm still working on focus, and will continue to try and figure out if it is me, settings, or calibration.

This image was taken from the car with the lens/camera steadied against the rubber gasket. Looking in DPP the primary focus point was in the birds chest, so I expected better results.

I believe it is a Cooper's Hawk



Well, he didn't like me getting too close and decided to find another roost.

PGM

I know what you mean! I can think of two things that might help--I take quite a few from my car. I steady my camera on a bean bag that I got from naturescapes.net. Second, I use a cable release, so that there is no camera shake that would occur if I pressed the shutter myself. Keep trying! We are all in this together. Best, Pam

pmaxwell

Thanks for the suggestions Pam.

I used them and took the tripod and cable release down to the park with my lab and made him model for me. It appears to me that both of my 70-200 and 400 F5.6 are off in focus. in most cases with the focus point on the eye or between the eyes (confirmed by DPP), the nose is in better focus than the focus point.

Allen

I almost always after auto focus tweak it manually to the eyes. ... if I have time. The camera is
probably focusing on a high contrasty area that includes more then the eyes. Long lenses are
worst with the shallow DOF.

Pupator

1/1000 and f/10 - you should be okay. It's either that the lenses off-focus or camera shake. It can't be which focus point the camera is selecting because that's what you're checking in DPP.

Scott Kelby would tell you its camera shake. It's always camera shake.

pmaxwell

I put some of the test shots up on my smugmug site. I used photoshop to lay in the focus point and put in test with the settings.

to me it looks a bit front focused on both lenses, but admittedly I'm not experienced enough to say if this is within the normal range on not.

Thoughts?

Harryb

How heavily cropped are these captures?

pmaxwell

These are straight out of the camera with the exception of the text and the focus drawing i did. The originals are available for view in smugmug

D90mark

I looked at the pictures of the Lab at your link and I don't think they look that bad. They are a tad dark but it looks like you are at -1/3 EV. You should be able to work those no problem PP. What are your camera settings? Are you shooting standard,vivid etc. Have you added any saturation or sharpening in camera?

And I am with Harry. If the hawk is a heavy crop it will be a bit soft.

pmaxwell

Harry,
I'm sorry, I thought your question about crop was related to the test pics I took today.

Here are the original Hawk picture. All sharpening and cropping removed.