Grey Falcon Falco hypoleucos

This rare Falcon lives mostly in the inland areas. I have only seen 5 in my life and the others were on the top of communication towers at about 250 feet or more. Luckily this one flew across our vehicle in western Queensland and landed about 40 yards away.
The light was poor so I had to go to high iso and down to 2000th without the teleconverter as I'm not confident with it on the PF in this sort of light. As this was the bird we had hoped for in 3400 k's over 8 days--Got lucky.


Attachment 182907


D5
500PF
1/2000TH
iso 4000
f5.6
h.h.
c and c very welcome hope you like it.

How much did you pay her to pose for you like that? :bg3: Very nice frame of rare bird in a rare pose... Well done!

Envy!!! For all the thousands of kilometers I have traveled in arid Australia, I have never seen one. Thought to be about 5000 individuals extant. IQ isn't the best but pose is with great eye contact.

love the pose but the IQ isn't there at all...not sure what happened. did you enlarge the crop or something?

Happy you witnessed the bird, how exciting, great dynamic pose but IQ is just not there, any chance you could improve the quality?

Echo comments of others on great pose and degraded IQ. Would have been nice to be faster that 1/2000 to catch this action, but you were up against it with light already.

What a great pose, if the IQ was there, this would be a killer frame.

Will

Yes image quality is not the best. But neat looking falcon. Pose is nice.

Thanks everyone for the comments.Obviosly there is not enough DOF but crop wasn't great about 40% off the NEF and it was at 7.30 AM ,so there shouldn't have been shimmer. Processed in Capture 1. I didnt enlarge the crop after the 40% Arash but in all the frames the noise seems to be constant .Anyway I will work on the flight frames to see if I can improve on this one. Not sure about this lens in low light yet; we shall see I guess .It certainly make life easy when travelling and up close.Thanks again.
..

hi Ian the poor IQ is from processing not the lens, if the RAW was sharp it should be much better than this. if you send the NEF over I can process it for you

Hi Ian

You had set your camera to DX crop mode so the RAW has only 12 mega pixels :eek3: instead of 21, (should never ever do this with the D5), in this case the bird was way too far and most of the frame would have been empty anyway.

For reference here is the 100% unprocessed crop from the DX RAW, it is pretty sharp, but the bird is tiny. You enlarged it and with too much NR and coarse sharpening it led to a disaster. I am afraid this one is a delete, not much one can do to salvage a frame like this with the bird so far away....

to get a high quality image you want the bird to be at least twice as large in the RAW as the final presentation , that is at least 3000 pixels wide, yours is less than 1000 pixels
hope this helps

I have no idea how that happened Arash apart from my idiocy. Thanks for the answer so quickly as well. This was the next frame as you would have guessed.
Ian

Great work by Arash above. In the OP the feathers are totally smoothed over, without any detail. The image in Pane #11 is much better in terms of IQ (though not up to Arash's very high standards.

with love and congrats on photographing this rarity.

a