Magpie portrait

[Dilom Ski]

This morning on the beach.A magpie came really close to my hide setup, this picture is around 50% crop.
D7000 500mm P manual focus + tc-14b 720mm f11 ISO 800, little bit of sharpening, color fringing removal and levels in postproduction.
The "P" is indeed a supertele quality, even with the converter.

[Diane Miller]

It's nice to see such close-up details. I didn't realize they look so much like crows (well, to me, anyway). You had nice soft light and got nice details in the blacks.

I don't know that lens but you got good sharpness in the plane of focus. With so much magnification of a closeup subject, depth of field is always small. It's always a challenge to try to get the subject to give you a head angle that out the beak in the same plane as the eye.

[Dilom Ski]

Thanks, Diane.These Magpies are always suspicious and when when the come close thats a compliment for my hiding technique:)
DOF and F-stop is crutual when playing around 5-8 meters from target with 500, or in this case 720 mm (over 1000mm in FF).Even at f11, its still not more that 2-3cm.Thats why I am always closing the aperture in this cases, maybe when/if I get a autofocus 500mm prime I will shoot more wide open, but for now is a challenge.
As for the sharpness, I use smart sharpen in Photoshop, plus I lightned the darks and lowered the contrast to get more detail in feathers.I suspect that the lens is going to perform even better with a body without AA filter (d7100,d7200,d810), because to be honest, pictures with d7000 look a bit like shooting through a window.Is good to have .raw to fix more of that:)