American Kestrel Poses

[David Stephens]

This was taken from my car-hide in Cherry Creek State Park, just South of Denver, CO on a fairly bright, but partly cloudy day, using the following:

Canon 7D
EF 500mm f/4L IS
EF 1.4x TC II
Resting lens on arm on car window sill (the IS is simply amazing)
ISO 400
+1 2/3EV
Aperture Priority
Resulting in 1/500th-second
RAW conversion in DxO's Optics Pro with very little adjustment, mainly pulling the RGB curve down a little
Taken from around 50-feet and cropped around 80% at RAW conversion

The light in the eye is natural. This is a lighter morph than typical in this part of the country. This was my very first shot and I tried for 45-minutes to get a great flight shot or better pose, but the strong light and resulting shadows conspired to make the best of the lot.




Thanks for looking and any suggestions are welcome.

Dave

[Lance Peters]

Hi David - Lovely looking bird.
Image appears soft and lacking and fine feather detail - did yo use any noise reduction on the image??

Did you have the car engine turned off?? - leaving the engine on results in vibrations that will effect your image quality.
Would have pushed that ISO quite a bit further to increase the shutter speed - the 7D should be good for 1600ISO without too many problems.

Maybe post the original without any changes??

[Alfred Forns]

Hi David Agree with Lance on all points !!! At the shutter speed you were using the image should have been sharp !!! If you need to increase the ISO don't think about it twice !! The 7D does great I use 800 routinely and more if needed !!

[Dave Mills]

Hi David, Great pose and light but agree the image is soft...

[David Stephens]

I probably didn't have the engine off. I saw the bird, pull to the shoulder quickly and took this in the first few seconds. I most often do turn off the engine, but there was a lot of traffic and I was on the main road. Later I pulled around a little and turned the engine off, but the light wasn't coming from the right direction.

No sharpening was applied beyond DxO's default.

[arash_hazeghi]

this one seems to be very OOF, not much you can do, sharpening doesn't help with OOF shots...better luck next time :)