Female Cardinal

[Matthew Schmalz]

Shot this with 7D MII and EF300 2.8 Camera setting was manual f 2.8, 1/800th second, at ISO 500, with evaluative metering. Basic adjustments with DPP4, cropped, white balance changed to shade, raised exposure, contrast and sharpened a bit.

Critique and comment are welcome and appreciated

[Jonathan Ashton]

Mathew, a good shot but insufficient depth of field, ask yourself where is it in best focus, ideally it should be the eye. To increase DOF you have two options, increase aperture and/or decrease magnification i.e. use a shorter focal length or move further back. I suspect you thought you would go for high quality at ISO 500 but I doubt you would have to much problem at ISO 1600. Hope this helps. Bare in mind the oft quoted a "good noisy one is better than a soft non noisy one".

[Isaac Grant]

I think you have a nice look back pose here. Interesting perch and I like the vine that is wrapping around the perch as well.

As Jonathan mentioned, the head is not sharp. Interestingly the beak looks OK but the head crest looks soft. You always want the head and eye to be sharp. As someone who has owned the 7d2 since the first day it came out, I have rarely been happy shooting above ISO 800. For a shot like this I think it would have been better to shoot at ISO 800 at about f5.6 or even higher. I think your shutter speed would have been similar and you would have had sufficient depth of field to get the whole bird sharp. Keep in mind that the closer you are, the less depth of field you have to work with.

As is the bird is too tight in the frame. I would give more room above and to the right.

Shot has more noise than I would expect for ISO 500. It would benefit from applying NR to the background.

Also the vine that is intersecting the tail is distracting as well.

[Matthew Schmalz]

All good feed back; points all valid and well taken Thanks guys!