Pied Kingfisher on a dive

[JohanMocke]

The Pied landed 5 meters from me in the evening shade.
I softened the background with a gausian filter and also lenghtened the bottom part of the picture to put the bird in a better perspective.
I am glad for the outcome being on such a high ISO - but I am open for some lessons from the experts.

Nikon D700
F 7.1
Ss 1/2000
ISO 1600
-0.67
F4

[Randy Stout]

Johan:

Very dynamic pose, true dive bomber look to it. Good call to extend the canvas below, needs room to dive into.
How big of a crop is this? The IQ seems a bit soft, although it is possible to have some motion blur even at this shutter speed.

Did you prefocus on the bird as perched, or try to achieve focus after he dove?

Cheers

Randy

[Arthur Morris]

Good stuff by Randy above. Great diving pose but IQ suspect. Can you post the full frame original? Love the feet. Face looks a bit muddy

[JohanMocke]

Thank you guys. Not n big crop. Bird so near that I had to switch to the slower focusing shorter distance on the lens. The IQ is suspect because of slow shutterspeed and shade. My question would be what settings I could use to get a better quality. Lens was handheld and not sure whether could have pushed the d700 for more! Yes, I tried pre focusing and could be misjudged as well.

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[Randy Stout]

Johan:

What lens were you using? I assume you had to turn off the focus limiter switch because the bird was too close?

Randy

[JohanMocke]

Nikon 200-400. Yes Randy. You've got the correct description!

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[Arthur Morris]

I am back. Let me know if the face is better or worse in the repost.... I started with a more traditional crop. As suspected, IQ was poor. The file I started with was only 106.8 kb. <400kb is OK for posting here. There was some artifacting around the bill.

My gut feeling is that sharpest focus was well on this side of the bird's face... Still, a great moment captured....

[JohanMocke]

Thank you Arthur. I must get to grips with the sizing of the postings here. I should have done better with the crop from the start! The bird was so near me that I was afraid to move my hands to reset certain features on the lens for fear that the bird would fly away. Next time I would try again since I like the action shots.

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[Arthur Morris]

YAW.

Crop your unsharpened master file to 900 pixels high. Sharpen it at Unsharp Mask" 120/0.3/0. Hit Save for Web. Optimize it to less than 395kb (from the dropdown menu at the Optimize symbol in the URC of the Save for web dialogue box) . Save to desired location. :) Post on BPN.

[JohanMocke]

Thanks Arthur.

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