Fancy flying: Swamp Harrier female

This bird and its mate were alternately hunting and apparently showing off aerobatics to each other in 35kph winds above a field - perhaps a mating ritual. Both birds were observed executing vertical loops, stall turns and other complex moves in between hunting forays. I love capturing big birds in flight at full stretch to show off the wing structure, and I caught this one just coming up into a stall turn. I like the way the partial back illumination highlit the feather quills in the starboard outer flight feathers.
Equipment: Canon EOS 7D, EF 100-400 L IS at 400mm, shutter priority, +1.0 ev exposure compensation, 1/1000 sec, f7.1, ISO400, servo AF, spot metering, handheld, camera aimed about 80 degrees upward (tough on the photographer's back!).
Processing: Adobe Lightroom CC2015, Photoshop CC 2017, noise reduction with Neat Image plugin. The tight crop is about 15% of the original frame area.
Location: Near Blackmans Bay, southern Tasmania, Australia

A nice shot, David and it shows the bird's colours well.
It is brave to do such an extreme crop with the 7D and it is just starting to show loss of detail. I think you could back off on the crop (20-25% of the area) without losing impact of the bird and at the same time improve apparent sharpness.

Hi David, the hawk is handsome but the shooting angle that's very steep and the head that's bent away from us aren't helping this image. overall the image is quite soft and noisy and too tight in the frame.

TFS

Hi David,what a stunning bird that courtship must of been some sight to see. David although I like your crop I'd like much more room around the bird. Although 400mm seems quite alot the reality is one needs to be very close to fill a frame even with these larger birds. I do utterly realise how tricky that can be and of course it is often impossible to achieve,but maybe trying to do that will help you move forwards. I'm on a very steep learning curve myself and this has become very very apparent to me over the last year . Maybe it might be worth trying to explore this,you can obviously take a beautiful image so might it be worth looking into field craft to get you closer Mate, Arash has just written a fantastic tutorial on his blog, it is really worth a read.

Hope to see much more from you

take care

Stu

Thanks everyone for the helpful feedback. One of the things I like about this site is that people are not afraid to say what they think, and offer useful suggestions for improvement. I must admit I was aware of the limitations of this image due to the amount of cropping, but it seemed a striking image and very characterful of this bird, so I decided to see what people thought of the one aspect vs. the other. I felt the limitations of the 400mm FL with this one, as I had positioned myself on the highest bit of topography around, and the bird repeatedly descended only to the same height every time, probably because that was the altitude at which it dropped out of the strongest wind current. I will try a less tight crop as soon as I get a chance, and submit a repost.

Cheers, David

PS particular thanks to Arash for your online tutorials, it's great that you're willing to provide such useful resources.

Hi David, I am glad you liked the tutorial.

I am really happy that you recognized the value of this site vs. other sites on the internet that just say "great shot". When I joined BPN in 2005 I had no idea what good bird image meant, I was taking the same kind of lackluster shots over and over and was wondering why I wasn't making progress, until I joined BPN and learned. the rest is history. If I hadn't joined BPN my life would have been different today.

As promised, here's another version with less cropping (about 25% of original area) and some minor contrast and sharpness enhancements on the bird. Hopefully this is a bit of an improvement - further comments invited and welcome. Digital noise is still an issue at this crop, so one question: what do people think is the cropping limit for good quality images from the 7D sensor (and can you safely crop further on images from the 7D II?).

As I mentioned before, I probably would have needed at least 600mm FL to make full advantage of this one on the Canon 7D sensor in the circumstances and limitations on the day, as closer approach wasn't possible. This was taken a few years ago, and I've since migrated to a 7D II / EF 100-400 L II / 1.4x TC III combo which potentially gives greater possibilities with this kind of opportunity, although at 560 mm f8 it can challenge the 7D II autofocus system in anything less than good light.

Cheers, David