Power lunch

[Steve Smith]

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j147/Steve_Smith43/birdphotographers/IMG_1799_birdphotographers_zpsb4769e6d.jpg

Young Merlin Falcon eating a sandpiper. Canon 70D, Tamron 150-600, 600mm, F8, 1/1000, ISO 1600

[Daniel Cadieux]

Way cool. Although I do not like the perch I do like how the sandpiper is hanging from it, legs dangling. A bit morbid, but that is OK. The feeding pose is rather powerful with the talon holding on. I do find that there is too much space behind the subject though...cropping some out there, or pointing the lens more to the right, would have been ideal.

[arash_hazeghi]

welcome to the forum! what a great scene to witness and capture. I like the prey and its dangling feet.

Dan covered the aesthetics, from a technical point of view the IQ is not great, they both look soft, contrasty and lacking in fine details, perhaps from application of heavy NR or soft focus.


TFS

[Steve Smith]

Arash and Dan - these are just the kind of comments that I am looking for - thank you very much. I'm so cheap that when I move house I take the wallpaper with me but the helpful comments that I am seeing in all the critiques of other people's photos are an incentive to cough up my $40 and become a member.

Arash, yes the image quality in this version is poor and yes I did apply a fair amount of NR to the TIF file on top of NR applied to the RAW file. I have other versions of this same shot that are better quality. I over processed this one trying to get more contrast on the falcon. I will revisit previous versions and the original RAW file and also other RAW fies of companion shots. Dan, this bird was a slow eater so I took 127 shots from different angles, with different backgrounds and different camera settings. I will rummage through my bag of RAW shots of this bird to see if I can find a suitably fierce pose combined with a better background and better image quality.

This bird ate the sandpiper's head first. Do either of you know if this is the usual starting point for falcons when eating a bird kill? It also appeared to eat the feathers. How much nutrition is there in a feather, or do feathers count as Falcon fibre?

This shot was taken on the Fraser Delta Nov 1 2014. The sandpipers fly around in very large flocks over open fields. There are also many other birds and small mammals which feed a fair population of falcons, hawks and harriers on the Delta.

[Steve Smith]

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j147/Steve_Smith43/birdphotographers/IMG_1887_birdphotpgraphers_zpse9cdcf9c.jpg

Arash, here is another shot of the Merlin. The image quality is no better. I believe the problem is soft focus. This was late on an overcast winter's afternoon with low light conditions. With the Tamron 150-600 in low light it is hard to get the auto focus to lock on to the subject even though the single focus point is correctly positioned. Also with the lens at maximum focal length of 600 mm, image quality does drop off. Even so I think most of the image quality problem is caused by difficulty in focusing correctly in low light with this lens.

[Steve Smith]

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j147/Steve_Smith43/birdphotographers/IMG_1799_birdphotographers_2_zps84923094.jpg

This is the original shot before I "improved" it. A little better.