Eagle takes Flight

[Moody McCall]

Came across this beautiful bird yesterday. Canon 7dii 500mm 1.4ext. iso 1600 f7.1 1/3200 any comments appreciated

[Alex Becker]

I like the position and composition of the eagle, although the twigs on the bottom are a bit distracting. The image looks soft and pretty noisy to me -- was this a big crop?

[Moody McCall]

Very minimal crop. In a shot just prior to this the wing tips were clipped. So the eagle is almost filling the frame. I did not do any noise reduction to the photo.

[Moody McCall]

Now applied some noise reduction! Think it is better

[David Salem]

The take off pose looks great and you had the sun angle in the right direction but the image is to soft and noisy. Looks like critical focus might have landed on the twigs behind the bird. If this isn't a large crop as you mentioned, then ISO 1600, especially in the blue sky, is just to much for your camera to handle well.
Also if a scene is OOF then the noise in the image will be even more pronounced.
The repost with the NR is worse. You very rarely have NR on the subject work well. You want to only reduce the noise in the BG and not touch the subject.
In this situation you should have had the ISO at 640 and maybe stop down to f6.3. This might have given you a ss of 1/2000 or so and is more than enough to freeze a bid bird like an eagle. Looks like you have some nice opportunities to better your skills. Keep shooting!

[Brian Desjardins]

Hi Moody, I like the repost , I also did see a bit of noise in the background but the repost fixed it, great shot. TFS !


Brian.

[arash_hazeghi]

The problem with this image is that the eagle is OOF. focus locked on the branches behind it


TFS