Not the bird, but the spider! I've included a 100% crop below so you can see the spider looking back at you. One bird, three eyes staring you down. Not bad. :D
I was shooting these guys today as they flew on to the perch, so the technical details are commiserate with that. I think tomorrow I'll try some custom functions so I can quickly switch from "bird in flight" mode to "bird on branch" mode.
This is a 50% crop.
1/3200 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1250, 7D, 500mm, manual everything.
Last edited by Colin Knight; 04-23-2010 at 11:37 PM.
Cool to see the spider's eyes, too. Head angle and BG look good, too. It seems you could have lowered the ISO and I would crop a tad off the right to get the bird out of the center.
Nice eye contact, cool behavior to catch and nice perch and BG.
Did you selectively sharpen the bird, or did you sharpen the whole image? I 100% agree with Axel that ISO 1250 was overkill here, hence the noise in the background. The noise also looks a little like it has been sharpened as well?
Make sure you check the original post. I was set up for them flying on to the branch, which required high shutter speeds and ISO. Today, I set up a separate custom function with appropriate settings for birds at rest. This allows me to toggle between the two very quickly in manual mode.
The 100% crop is sloppily made, sharpened only so you could see the spiders eyes.
The full image has sharpening applied to the bird only.