Found my prized nugget

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

I shot this at Rockport TX last year off a boat that I chartered for the day.

canon markIII, 1600@f8, canon 400mm 5.6 + 1.4 monopod

[Arthur Morris]

Great bird. Good EXP. Image quality and sharpness poor. BKGR noisy. Bird angled away. Needs more room on the bottom.

[Fabs Forns]

Maestro got all the points. What bird is it? Some kind of Crane?
It looks a little out of focus.

[Arthur Morris]

It's a Whooping Crane!

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great find and exposure control. Artie covered all the techs.

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

Photo degraded when uploaded it does look terrible. Here is one before it grabbed the root. This is full frame just a little crop to the left.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

If the image is larger than 200kB the quality suffers when it is downsized. The repost does look better, just the 'virtual legs' are missing. I'd love to see this species sometime.

[Arthur Morris]

Better yes, but the face is still not sharp and the BKGR bokeh is strange.

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

I just got Nik 3.0 pro sharpener and as you see not to good with it yet as it will take some experimenting.

The day I was out on the boat of course the wind was 25 to 35 mph and it was rough so my 400 and 600 are not IS so the images were not as sharp as I would of like.

As far as the background your on the upper deck of the boat so you can shoot over the brush along the edge and you're shooting down on the birds. I should of had the 1.4 off so I could be at 5.6 but we came up on this bird fast as it was hunkered down and pop up when we got close so it was shoot fast before it flushed.

Thanks for all your help