Grey Plover taking off

[Manjeet & Yograj Jadeja]

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/yograj/7880838170/" title="grey plover by wildlens2, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7126/7880838170_d2d466995f_b.jpg" width="900" height="600" alt="grey plover"></a>

Grey plover taking off
After crawling for a while and shooting some other waders, i decided to try the kenko 1.4x DGX teleconverter on the 400 f5.6,
one of them took off, this was the only one that i kept, although it was not that sharp, but workable.
selectively sharpened the bird and removed the noise from the background.

Canon 7D with canon 400mm f5.6 and 1.4x kenko tc, iso 1600, 1/1600 @ f9, EV+0.7

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Great timin on the capture. Curious, were you able to auto-focus with the teleconverter? A couple of suggestions: noise reduction on the wings, less tight of a crop, try to fix blown highlights on the face and wings, and maybe sharpen a tad.

[Marina Scarr]

Absolutely love the action here, esp the position of the feet and the wings. The BG works. The problem is the bird is soft. If you are going to use the 400 F5.6 with a teleconverter, I would suggest that you use a Canon rather than a Kenko b/c it auto focuses quite a bit faster and has much better quality class. You can get them now used at a pretty good price.

[Alan Murphy]

Nice head angle. I like the sand in the image. Bird looks a bit soft.

[Manjeet & Yograj Jadeja]

Miguel- the focussing with TC is a hit and miss affair, need to use live view on 7d for better AF accuracy.
Marina- we didnt get the canon due to budget constraints, and also for the fact that we would not be using it with 7d
too often, and it would need taping the contacts to work. the second hand market in India is not as big as in US or UK.
But when we go for an upgrade we will get the canon 1.4 TC III.
Alan- yes the bird is very soft and the background is OOF Flamingos :)

[Daniel Cadieux]

I really do like the pose and the OOF flamingos. As mentioned the bird is soft due to subject movement. I wouldn't recommend using live view for birds in flight or action though...