Iora

[Ihtisham Kabir]

These birds are common in the local wooded areas and reasonably friendly. I got this one at Purbachol, Bangladesh.
Canon 1D Mark IV, Canon 100-400mm I (at 380mm), 1/1250 sec shutter, f6.3, ISO 1250.
Thanks for looking. C/C welcome. Ihtisham

[Marina Scarr]

Your bird works pretty well in this environment and the colors work well together. Your bird doesn't look sharp to my eyes. If you are going to go square, I would take some off of the bottom.

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the colors, but the environment is a bit busy and the image is soft.

It looks like you have trouble getting sharp images, I am moving this to the ETL where you can get more help. check out this thread about sharpness too

http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...49#post1118549

[Diane Miller]

Hi Ihtisham,

I suspect not many of us here have used the 1D IV. (I haven't.) My first thought is, are you using a single focus sensor and getting it accurately on the face? The sensors generally cover a wider area than the viewfinder display will indicate, as (at least in later bodies) they have invisible helper points surrounding at least for the center focus sensor. The focus sensors like areas that are more detailed and possibly it is just grabbing a nearby area that has more contrast.

The other thought is that possibly the body and lens are not matched in microfocus adjustment. I like Focus Tune for checking and correcting things like that and would highly recommend it if the focus point itself doesn't seem to be the issue. You have excellent sharpness on the stalk just behind the bird's back so there is not an issue with camera shake or some of the other possible soft-focus issues here.

[Ihtisham Kabir]

Hi Diane and Arash - many thanks for your assistance. The 1DM4 has individual focus points, though I used a 4-point "expansion" for this photo so the camera. I am pretty sure (though not 100%) that the focus point was on the eye. But Diane's point is well taken and I should probably go to single AF point without expansion and rigorously get to the eye as Arash suggests in the link.

I also had a fair number of oof issues with my 500/f4 IS II. Then the diaphragm got stuck and Canon has it. With the 500mm I could blame it on handholding and camera shake, but the 100-400 is a lightweight lens so I cannot blame that any more.

So my plan is to go out and shoot more and use the single-point and eye-focusing. If problem persists then I will have to check the microadjustment.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Ihtisham

[Ihtisham Kabir]

Well the microadjustment should be easy to check by simply putting the camera on a tripod and cable release right?

[Ihtisham Kabir]

I got sharp ones such as this one
http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...n-Pied-Starlng
so I just have to figure out what I did right there. (or was it dumb luck despite bad gear/technique?)

[Diane Miller]

I think (at least in this image) the surrounding points are locking onto textures and edges outside your center point, which are also out of the desired focus plane. The single point is probably even larger than you see indicated. DOF for our commonly used settings and magnification is smaller than we might think, and for my taste, smaller than the equation indicates. For me, the commonly used value for the circle of confusion is too liberal.

For microadjustment, I doubt you can do very well without one of the programs designed for it -- I really like Focus Tune for its precision and the information it presents, but I can't offer a comparison to other similar programs.

[Ihtisham Kabir]

So does the Focus Tune software work by itself or do I also need to get the LensAlign product? (It works "standalone" but does it really?) Having never used one of these before, is there going to be a different calibration for each lens then? Thanks Diane!

[Diane Miller]

Yes, you need the hardware, too, and it is a newer version (LensAlign Mk II) than the previous one. They have some videos and tutorials on their web site.

It isn't exactly cheap but gives very good and repeatable results. Each lens has its own calibration, and with newer bodies (don't know about the 1D IV) a zoom is calibrated at both ens of the range and the camera interpolates as needed. And there is a separate calibration for each teleconverter.

Reikan FoCal is a similar product but I have no experience with it and haven't seen reviews.

But it may only be worthwhile if you can determine that you have a consistent error.

[arash_hazeghi]

99% of the time the gear doesn't need micro adjust, operator error is mainly to blame for soft shots. it is the last resort if everything else fails

see this article on my blog http://arihazeghiphotography.com/blo...always-needed/

Don't overlook heat shimmers as the main cause of soft photos, in you example above nothing is really sharp to my eye but it's hard to tell without seeing a 100% crop from RAW

[Ihtisham Kabir]

Thanks Arash. It was a very hot morning, so shimmer might be the culprit. Fixable in post-processing?

[Ihtisham Kabir]

Sorry just read your blogpost and it looks like it is unfixable. However, there should be reliable ways to model the shimmer and then do a deconvolution to undo the effects but I am not sure if such methods are available in commercial image processing packages.

[arash_hazeghi]

Sorry just read your blogpost and it looks like it is unfixable. However, there should be reliable ways to model the shimmer and then do a deconvolution to undo the effects but I am not sure if such methods are available in commercial image processing packages.

No it's not possible to do that, you cannot simply model heat shimmers nor can you recover the detail that is permanently lost.


There are image "enhancement" techniques but they are not acceptable in terms of the critical quality that is required for photography.

I'm afraid you have to delete this file and try another day when conditions are better



best