I rarely get a chance to shoot birds in flight (and as a result am not very accurate), but I found a rookery in South Carolina where I could sit and shoot for hours at a time (alone!). I've only gotten to look through a portion of the pictures, but I like this one. JPG looks noisier than the original so I tried to tone that down a bit. I will hopefully get to post others...
D300
100-300 @ 300 mm
F4 (-.33)
1/640
ISO 640
hand held
~ 20% crop
BIF are an interesting challenge, and practice certainly helps. I often go to the local bird sanctuary and just shoot the ducks and swans in flight to keep sharp.
What brand of lens were you shooting with? My first thought was the manual focus Nikon 100-300 zoom, which is a nice lens, but not a good choice for BIF. Perhaps a non Nikon lens?
I like the stretched out pose, well exposed. Did you run noise reduction on the entire image, or just the sky?
Mike, a nice start with a bird in flight image. I find that wings totally up or totally down are generally the most pleasing. The other challenge is getting the underside lit up.(and also the face) You can either position yourself so that the natural light is doing this, but often a bit of flash helps. I do not have specialized software for noise reduction either, and so I never reduce noise on my subject, I just use cs4, select the subject, then the inverse and run nr on that. I hope to see more from you, nice that you have a good place to go and practice.! Also, this bird is turned ever so slightly away from you which does create a disconnect with the viewer.
Mike,
Grace offers some very good advise/critique. This is a very good attempt for someone who doesn't do much flight stuff. My advise is to stay with it and things will only get better.
Hi Mark,
On a blue sky it should not be a problem to do selective noise reduction.
Here's two links that could help you do that.
The one for sharpening can be used for noise reduction, except for the inverse selection:
As for the image, good exposure, it could be a little sharper and wish for the wings to be fully extended, either in the up or down stroke.
Will be looking forward to more!
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