Tern / What can I do to make this shot better?

[Celeste Painter]

Here's another one of those I-really-wanted-this-shot-to-work images because it's rare for me to get a top-down view of birds in flight/dive.

Also, does anyone know which Tern this is? Taken in Eastern Oregon (July 2012). (In another image, I can even read the tag number on the bird's leg)

Gear: 5dm2, 100-400L, handheld
Settings: 1/500 sec at f/10, 1EV, ISO400, 400mm
Lightroom Post-processing: GIANT crop; dust removal; cloned-out tree leaves in bottom corners; adjusted for: color temp, exposure, fill light, black, brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance, sharpening, noise reduc., and profile lens correction.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Celeste,

This works for me in an abstract sort of way. I really like the unique composition the emptiness of flight the subject looking down on the earth. The opportunities are exposure techs and composition. Regarding composition you could experiment with moving the subject towards the corner moreover away from the center. My exposure thoughts are some possible hot pixels that could be avoided with a faster shutter. To achieve this use a wider aperture like f/8 and bump up the shutter speed. Given there was no distracting background to blur the additional DoF f/10 offers is not needed.

There might be some IQ reduction issues as well due to the large crop generally speaking we want the subject to be at least 20% of the frame - hard to do with BIF. I like what you are doing here was the metering evaluative and the shooting mode AV? Nice work would love to see more from you, good eye for composition and balancing the frame.

[Celeste Painter]

Thanks -- A lot of helpful ideas to try. I was disappointed that he wasn't closer so I could fill the frame more. Maybe I just need a longer lens : )

I was shooting TV w/ 1EV because I was shooting awkward lighting conditions--the sun was low in the sky and behind me behind some trees and I was standing right next to a dark river as the tern made passes in front of me, all the while I was hoping a group of wood ducks would swim out from under the branches of the dark trees on the other side--500 seemed the fastest I could go and still do okay across all of the conditions.

Maybe the IQ reduction was from posting to Picasa--I convert to jpg and compress down to an 80% quality level before posting.

I'm definitely going to play w/ composition and see if I can get it to look more pleasing.

[Ian Cassell]

Hi Celeste. I'm afraid this is one where the 400 just doesn't cut it. I have a zillion of these and keep trying to win powerball to get a longer lens. Techs look good (maybe a bit hot on the cheek), but the bird is lost in the expanse of sky. Perhaps adding some clouds would bring up the interest quotient? TFS

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Celeste, I think we all have a lot of images that worked well in our imaginations, but the reality is that too small in the frame is just too small. Not much you can do about it and the large crop certainly throws away too many pixels to have enough left for resolution. To answer the question posed by the thread title, I can only say "not much" because the bird is just way too small in the frame. I'm afraid the shot was doomed in the camera, and there's no magic post processing that will alter that. I do like what you have done with what you have in the image, but it just isn't going to get any sharper.

I'm curious about your thinking in using TV mode. I agree with your statement about 1/500 being the lowest shutter speed you could get away with, but why leave the other settings to the camera, especially in difficult lighting conditions? If there was ever a case for manual mode, it would be difficult lighting situations. Knowing that you are exposing for you subject and not the background, you can make a decision about what the correct exposure is for the subject and then forget about it unless it goes into the shade. You can see that the camera picked f/10, which you really didn't need in this situation, and you limited the possible shutter speed by using TV. You could have shot this at f/5.6 and 1/1000 or even faster, and likely would have had better sharpness.

[stevehill]

Looks like a common term to me