SonyA700~Sony70-400G@400mm~ISO1000~F5.6~1/1600 sec~manual exposure~6-27-2009~Brazos Bend State Park, Texas~CS4 (note:this is not a composite)
comments and critique welcomed. regards~Bill
Nice work William - glad you mentioned it was not a composite.
Really like the composition - plenty of good HA'S here as well.
Looks quite soft on my screen - some additional sharpening looks like it would help. Some more DOF at the time of shooting may have been a option. Personally I might try to darken the sky a little - But then Im a Nikon blue fan ;)
Very nice composition and pastel colors. Believe this is a difficult picture to get as you would like. It appears in early morning or late day. Have tried to do the same with pelicans without much success. The problems are reltively low light and wide spacing (ie noise if ISO is increased and need for large depth of field). As well as I can calculate, depth of field is somewhere around only 17 feet at 5.6. Would be interested in others suggestions for these conditions. Would suggest adding more border esp to the right and top if you have this available in the file or possibly using quick mask to add wider border. Moving the single bird to the right and cutting off some of the left border might also help but these would require entering compositeland.
Got four perfect wing positions and no overlap !!!
Agree with suggestions by Richard !!! dof wise I would not worry much since at this distance there is plenty, possible the most important ingredient is the light quality for reproducing the birds !! .... btw pelicans are even more difficult due to the dark feathers and light head !!!
Thanks guys. Richard: good observations. Late in the day, light quickly fading. This shot was not pre-planned at all. As a matter of fact I personally don't like large void spaces in images, and prefer flight captures with one bird getting as close to full frame as possible, trying to avoid clipping the wings. Closer to the subject, the more detail. I can always add space latter if needed, which isn't too difficult if it is only sky. I might add that increasing the depth of field much more important the closer the subject; partly because it helps compensates for focus errors that tend to occur in flight captures, as well as getting the right areas in focus, most of the time this means the entire bird.
I was taking pictures of birds not in flight, just so happened to look up, and I saw 'em coming. I had a few seconds to adjust the camera. I might have considered increasing the depth of field, indeed if they had been a flock of pelicans, which are very large birds, it would have been pretty much mandatory. In this case, with the spoonbills, I would have decided against it, not because its a bad idea in general, but here it would have meant either higher ISO or reduced shutter speed. The camera was hand held, and perhaps I could have got away with 1/1250, perhaps not, and noise considerations aside, increasing above ISO 1000 would have deleterious effect on image detail. I was surprised, afterward, that the birds where roughly in the same focal plane, which as Alfred has pointed out DOF increases substantially the further distance to the subjects. I didn't do much sharpening, if any, I often forget the need for sharpening after image downsizing prior to JPEG conversion. Tryed it on the image, it helped.
Increasing the void space on outer borders, very simple with this image. PS-filter/distort/In dialog Box; scale(decrease),Edge: Edge extension. regards~Bill
Odd Man Out
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