Copulating Kingfishers

[dennis greenwood]

Taken on my local river ,I was sat in the river in a portable hide ,camera mounted on the tripod pointing south waiting for the bird to fly up and land on a perch I had set up,i had a small opening to my right were I could see the kingfisher land on his usual spot before flying up to the perch,on this occasion I did notice the bird was hanging around so I gambled on taking the camera of the tripod and slowly slip the lens handheld through the gap I had. .....taken with a 1d mkiii and the 400mm 5.6 iso 1600 1/250 sec at 5.6 a large crop which dosent help the noise https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7354/16318191267_f4e8e9d592_b.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/qRYZKi)Mating Kingfishers (1 of 1) (https://flic.kr/p/qRYZKi) by den9112 (https://www.flickr.com/people/58980779@N04/), on Flickr

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hey Dennis, you really did well to capture the moment. Definitely a shot I would wish for.
Image quality isn't great - as you mention. Maybe you can carefully minimise the noise - you don't mention what you have already done in processing, so hard to say where to go next!
Thanks for sharing,

Gerald

[dennis greenwood]

Hi , Thanks for the comment,i do the basics in PP, I sharpened to 90% in LR no adjustment to vibrancy and saturation,slight lift in shadows and moved the black slider up a touch and selected the background only for noise reduction,and +33 on exposure

[Marina Scarr]

Killer behavior shot and good for you for capturing it in truly the perfect pose. I do believe you could probably get rid of all of the noise in your background with no problem. Make sure you don't sharpen the BG, only the birds. I think with the right processing you could really improve the quality of the image, although I do understand the large crop is going to be an issue.

[Diane Miller]

Sharpening in LR will bring out grain more than anything else. I'm not sure what you mean by 90%, though -- sharpening is on a slider from 0 to 150, defaulting to 25. I don't know of a way to do it as a percentage.... But if I had a grain issue I'd develop with the 25 default brought down to 0 and sharpen later in PS (judiciously) and again on the JPEG. Noise is something we are very limited in dealing with.

[William Dickson]

Fab image Dennis. I have never seen this before so thanks for sharing. You have the lot here, pose, HA and a very rare thing to photograph. It is a pity about the IQ. If this was mine I would spend time on it. As it is well worth keeping.

Great capture. Well done

[dennis greenwood]

Thanks all ,I have about 20 images and looking again at this one I do believe I have a few better ones ,going to spend some time and do as suggested on the sharpening issue

[christopher galeski]

nice capture Dennis,as been said,is a bit noisey,but to catch them atit:w3,good un.