Equipment, Process, or Unreasonable Expectations?

largelylivin

I posted some examples in Finishing School of a Hawk photo that demonstrates my dissatisfaciton my end results. Take a look and see if you have any suggestions here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=679821#post679821

Here's my original finished photo of a red-tailed hawk. Or, maybe you'll see something by looking at my whole set of bird photos here: http://smile-123.smugmug.com/gallery/3301938/5#P-1-15

raptorcaptor

I'm guessing that this is significantly cropped, and that is your main problem. It just doesn't have the resolution to hold up. I have seen some very good, sharp images from the Sigma 50-500 so I don't think it is your lens. Post processing can enhance an image but not give you detail that doesn't exist.

Okay looked at your original thread. Taking good photos of raptors takes practise, and you are off to a good start. One of the hardest things to learn is when not to take a shot. I have taken hundreds of shots just like this one. Now I only shoot birds in flight if I'm close enough to get an image that I'll be happy with. If its too far away leave it, or wait for it to get closer.

Also try shooting in manual mode for bifs. Take an exposure reading of the sky, and compensate about +2 stops. Take a shot, and make the necessary adjustments. This way you are exposing for the bird, and if the bird flies against a darker bkg. the exposure is still good.

The Bigma is a good candidate for the BushHawk

http://www.bushhawk.com/

Giphsub

I have slowly learnt the same thig about leaving birds alone that are just not close enough. Good advice that.

Glen, do you have one of those bushhawk things?

raptorcaptor

Giphsub wrote:

I have slowly learnt the same thig about leaving birds alone that are just not close enough. Good advice that.

Glen, do you have one of those bushhawk things?

I do, but I haven't played with it too much. Jody Melanson uses one all the time and his Bifs are incredible!

Maestro

raptorcaptor wrote:

I do, but I haven't played with it too much. Jody Melanson uses one all the time and his Bifs are incredible!

Bushawk needs to hire Jody as its spokesperson!

Oh and I agree with Glenn on the advice.

Giphsub

it looks interesting, but I have to get myself a big lens first!

Anyway, not to take this too far off track.

jfriend

largelylivin wrote:

I posted some examples in Finishing School of a Hawk photo that demonstrates my dissatisfaciton my end results. Take a look and see if you have any suggestions here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=679821#post679821

Here's my original finished photo of a red-tailed hawk. Or, maybe you'll see something by looking at my whole set of bird photos here: http://smile-123.smugmug.com/gallery/3301938/5#P-1-15

I do see several photos that don't stand up to close scrutiny. You only have up to the XL size enabled so I can't see the real pixels, but there are a few observations:

In this one, it looks like you missed focus and hit the background. I think the leaves behind the bird are sharper than the bird.

This one is at 1/500th and 500mm. If it was handheld without VR, that's pretty hard to hold the lens still enough to not get motion blur.

This one is at 1/1000th and f/8 and actually looks decently sharp. Unless you upsized it, it looks like you also didn't have to crop much on this image so perhaps you were closer. I don't quite understand why a 2286x3200 image is only 498kb in size. Did you save it with a low JPEG quality level? If so, that will seriously mess with detail when you look up close. Hmm, it looks to me like you must have upsized the first image or used a really lousy JPGE quality level because this one is the same number of pixels and it's 3.64MB, seven times as large. Is there anything going on in your processing workflow that messes with the number of pixels? Are you resizing your images in any way?

This one, is at 1/1000th and f/9.5 and looks decently sharp. Again, it's only 314kb so something weird is going on in your workflow to make it that many pixels, but that small a file size.

This one just looks to me like it was severely cropped and then upsized. Could that be what happened?

When I look at all the images in that gallery, they ALL have a long side of 3200 pixels. If I can correctly assume that you must have cropped some of these (probably some of them severely), then you also must have been resizing them all to the same number of pixels. If you've been resizing and we're looking at the resized results, it's very, very difficult for us to see what the result of the shooting was versus the result of your post processing, cropping and resizing. I actually now suspect that some of your problem is in those workflow steps. If you have unresized images (where the original pixels are entirely intact, we could help much more easily and could separate out which problems might be shooting and which might be post processing. Can you explain why all the images have the exact same size long dimension? And, why some images of similar pixel dimensions are 500kb and some are 3.2MB?

I also saw a bit of trend where the images at f/8 and f/9.5 seemed much sharper than the ones at f/5.6 and f/6.7. Could that be a characteristic of your lens? It is common for zoom lenses (and probably even more common for super-zooms) to have their weakest sharpness at max zoom and wide open.