4 swans

[Bob Smith]

We had a big influx of these guys arriving for the winter over the last 2 weeks. In Aperture I added sharpening, a bit of contrast, some recovery,and considerable shadows slider as well as a bit of mid-contrast and moving the levels slide a bit to L. . 5DMIII, EF 70-300 f4-5.6L--ISO200,0 EV, f/6.7, 1/1000, shutter priority,61 pt. AF.

[arash_hazeghi]

Hi Bob, welcome to BPN.

You found a nice group of geese but this image has many issues. from an aesthetic point of view all the birds are flying away from you in a steep angle, it would be much better to capture them when flying towards you and closer to eye level. they are small in the frame, have a strong sharpening halo around them, the whites are blown and lastly the image is noisy.

Try to use manual mode so the meter doesn't get fooled by the sky and severely underexpose the image, like it did here. also checkout the ETL forum. lots of useful resources there. good luck

[Bob Smith]

Hi Arash and thanks for the welcome and the helpful advice---I know the latter is something I need a lot of. The positioning issue is a bit beyond my control as these swans fly across the marsh on routes and at altitudes that are for the most part random but I'm hoping to use some snow goose decoys in the New Year to get them down and in closer. This halo issue drives me nuts. I thought I'd managed to avoid it here for the most part. Is it around the full perimeter of each bird or is it more marked in some areas than others? As I understand it an ISO of 200 shouldn't cause noise so what is the culprit here? would the crop do it? (It is about a 50% crop).