Whinchat, female

[Tomasz Zawadzki]

Taken with:
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
EF600mm f/4L IS II USM +1.4x III
ƒ/10.0
1/800
ISO 1600

This from last weekend. I was hoping for the male but only female arrived to get some mealworms. At least the light was good, about 20 minutes before it went down the horizon.
It's 100% frame.

[arash_hazeghi]

love the pose and the perch and the BG , the diagonal composition is nice too. I wouldn't shoot at f/10 the image will be soft from diffraction blur.

TFS

[Tomasz Zawadzki]

Thanks Arash. What do you mean exactly with "I wouldn't shoot at f/10 the image will be soft from diffraction blur."?
Honestly f10 was not enough as the legs are not completely in focus. If i shoot at lower f it would be worse. I think i should have shoot it at f13 to have legs in focus.

What do you guys think? The distance from the bird was 5.7 m.

[arash_hazeghi]

Thanks Arash. What do you mean exactly with "I wouldn't shoot at f/10 the image will be soft from diffraction blur."?
Honestly f10 was not enough as the legs are not completely in focus. If i shoot at lower f it would be worse. I think i should have shoot it at f13 to have legs in focus.

What do you guys think? The distance from the bird was 5.7 m.

Hi Tomasz, at small aperture your image will become soft due to diffraction blur. https://photographylife.com/what-is-diffraction-in-photography/

The MFD of the 600 is 5.5m so if you were shooting that close you would be better off using a shorter lens or move back a little bit to get all of the bird sharp without needing to stop down too much

best

[Tomasz Zawadzki]

Thanks Arash. I wasn't really aware about that. Honestly i didn't see that in my pictures but i will take a look on them to see if they are softer than the ones at f7.1 or f8.
From some lens comparison it looks like stopping down make it softer. I thought that at least with converter stopping down a bit will make it sharper, maybe it was like that with version I of the lens.

So maybe it's better to be like 0.5m further and then stop less and crop a bit more. Maybe the result would be better in terms of sharpness.

I wonder what other people think about stopping down and diffraction.

[Tomasz Zawadzki]

Arash the MFD of 600 II is 4.5m. So i was 1.2m away from it. But with this lens DOF is still shallow and if birs is not parallel it is a problem below f8.

I have another questions to all of you. Does the converter 1.4 change the DOF? I mean if i shoot the same bird with bare lens at 4.5 and then shoot it with 1.4x converter from 6m.
I mean that the bird will be in same size in the photo but shooting from 6m with converter will allow to use more open lens like f7.1 and f8. But when shooting with bare lens at 4.5m away i would have to stop a lot more to have the bird exactly with same DOF.

Am i right about that?

[arash_hazeghi]

you're right it's 4.5m my bad

the converter doesn't change DOF much by itself, if you shoot 600mm at f/4 you will have about the same DOF as shooting 840mm at f/5.6 from the same distance. The subject becomes larger. If you move back when adding the convertor to get the same size subject in the fame then DOF will be deeper because your working distance is larger now....

you can use this http://www.photopills.com/calculators/dof to calculate DOF

best

[Tomasz Zawadzki]

Thanks Arash