Sandgrouse

[Pieter de Waal]

80852

From my Kgalagadi Transfrontier Trip. I was trying to get a group of these in flight FF. The staggered flight pattern however made this dificult as some birds were OOF. I was able to crop this one to exclude the OOF and half birds and added some canvas on the left for composition.
NR on background about 80% of FF. Beanbag from vehicle.

50D/EF500f4+1.4/f8@1/2500/iso800/EC+0.33

C&C allways welcome.

[Jeff Dyck]

Wow - outstanding job getting all three birds in focus - not an easy thing to do. The nice dorsal view of the middle bird makes the shot for me.

[Jim Fenton]

Love the grouping and am impressed that they all have great sharpness and catchlights.

I'm a little bugged by the OOF background as unless it was really far away, f8 should have picked up some texture in it. It's almost too smooth and makes the subjects look as if they were placed there. Don't quite know how you managed the BG blur with NR and still end up with such a finite edge to the subjects?

You have a little issue going on above the right shoulder / elbow of the lead bird.

[Morkel Erasmus]

they sure are erratic and difficult to capture - I like that you got so many in focus Pieter! nicely done

[Marc Mol]

Well done to get ALL 3 sharp. Nice comp and BG also.
TFS

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

This is stunning....to get three birds sharp and within DOF is itself a very impressive achievement....and you took it several notches up by nailing all the head angles...WOW.

[Daniel Cadieux]

The altenating poses is what makes this one very cool!:cool: I like it very much, but some touching up to the BG surrounding the right bird is a must to give the image a nicer finish.

[Jan Wegener]

spectacular image. Awesome job of getting all three such nicely into the frame and sharp

[Jim Crosswell]

A beautiful flight image! I like the sharpness and different angles in this one.

[Thanaboon Jearkjirm]

I like what you try to do here, the three in focus birds with different poses made this one for me. Agree about the background above the right most bird, I might try to smooth it out a bit.

[Arthur Morris]

Only 3? Remarkable getting them all on the same plane. Was the lens barrel resting on the beanbag or the back of your left hand???

BKGR looks natural to me. May we see the original image?

[Pieter de Waal]

Thanks for the feedback and comments , much appreciated. Jim the trees were a distance away as you see in the original. Arthur the lens barrel on the back of my hand on the beanbag, will have to invest in a better setup at later stage, too many blurred flight shots.
Arthur here is the original, not sure how to do it but reduced tiff to required jpeg size and reduced quality to within 200kb.

[Jim Fenton]

Duly impressed. With the exception of one little spot you did a great job on the background and cleaning up the other birds.

Also, nice job with the left extension...I never would have noticed that you reconstructed that wing tip.

[Arthur Morris]

Agree, you did great. You should be hand holding for flight--working off a bean bag for flight makes zero sense to me :)

[Stu Bowie]

Pieter, I like how the center sandgrouse is in a completely different flight posture to the other two. Excellent work on removing the OOF birds, especially the wing tip through the eye.

[Pieter de Waal]

Thanks again all for the feedback. Yup Arthur will be practicing handholding, one heavy bit of equipment though.

[Arthur Morris]

Good luck. The 500 f/4 is not too bad for short periods of flight photography.