This is another shot of mine of an Australia Wedge Tailed Eagle being harassed by a group of magpies. Magpies are fearless when it comes to raptors. These guys are the king of the skies with wing spans of over 2.5m easily and have been known to pig up sheep occasionally when food is scarce. In the background you are able to see that this particular magpie already has some holes in his wings from previous run in's with other raptors.
Shot on Canon 7D & 500mm F4 + 1.4xTCIII 1/800s @f5.6 ISO320 This shot was also taken at almost minimum focusing distancing, meaning this is not cropped at all, full frame. Handheld. Preferably I would've liked to have a faster shutter speed to freeze the action more, but was trying to expose for the shadows under the wings slightly more.
for processing i used a combination of lightroom and photoshop. I used lightroom for adjustments and then used photoshop for local adjustments for sharpening. Sharpening I used NIK and Raw presharpener in NIK. I also used Topaz De Noise for noise reduction.
Nice action shot, Scott! I feel that there's too much out of focus and you really needed a faster ss to make this one work. I never go lower than 1/1250s for BIF and it works for me 90% of the time. I reckon you've had enough ISO spare to play with (you should be OK up to 800 ISO at least with the 7D without seeing any negative impact) in order to increase your ss.
The eagle's head looks sharp, but the wing blur has an odd look that I wouldn't expect. You couldn't possibly get both birds in focus, so that's not an issue.
At first I couldn't see your shooting specs. I use the Capt James skin, which has a dark gray BG. (You can change skins in the far lower left of each screen.) But I noticed a blank area at the bottom of the post window and changed my background to white and now I see you have included them. The text right under the picture is white on the black BG but the text that gives the specs is black, and invisible. I'm not sure how that happens but I see it occasionally here. Was it copied from another source? It would be good to find out what is happening to make some text invisible.
hi Diane, thanks for your reply :) yes I just copied the specs over from my facebook page where I posted the image originally. So that is probably why the font colour was slightly different.
Wedge Tailed Eagle Australian outback
