Godwit

[Scott Frye]

Marbled Godwit at Dunedin Causeway, Florida

1/640 at f10 and ISO200
Canon 500mm
Canon 7D

[Ofer Levy]

Sharp with nice detail. A slightly lower shooting angle could have been even nicer but this is still lovely. I wonder why you selected iso 200 as you needed high shutter speed and the 7D holds nicely even up to 640 iso from my experience.

[Phil Ertel]

Exposure and sharpness look good. The pose is nice but I would have preferred that the raised leg and foot had been sharp. Did you do some work in the lower right hand corner? There appears to be a repetitive clone mark in that area and it looks a bit odd to me.

[Scott Frye]

I shot AV (F10) with auto ISO and the camera picked the SS. I am a bit puzzled as to why the raised foot is not sharper. The bird is not running and I would think that 1/640 is enouigh to keep the raised foot in focus. I did some cloning of the shore line in the lower right

[Ofer Levy]

I shot AV (F10) with auto ISO and the camera picked the SS. I am a bit puzzled as to why the raised foot is not sharper. The bird is not running and I would think that 1/640 is enouigh to keep the raised foot in focus. I did some cloning of the shore line in the lower right

I guess everyone has his/hers own style and way of doing things but I strongly believe that for Bird photography which is quite a challenging form of photography - everything has to be done manually. I have never taken even one shot using any kind of automatic settings. This is why exposure control, speed etc are never a problem.

[Arthur Morris]

I guess everyone has his/hers own style and way of doing things but I strongly believe that for Bird photography which is quite a challenging form of photography - everything has to be done manually. I have never taken even one shot using any kind of automatic settings. This is why exposure control, speed etc are never a problem.

To quote a friend of mine from a recent post, the bit about exposure control, speed etc., never being a problem is nonsense. Whether one is working in Av Mode or Manual they still have to know what they are doing. When backgrounds are consistent I often work in Av Mode--probably about 40% of the time and when creating intentional blurs I almost always work in Tv mode. To suggest that if some simply works in manual mode that they will get everything right is, well, I've got to say it again, nonsense.

[Arthur Morris]

Scott, 5/6ths of this image is wonderful: sharp, clean, with a nice angle to the bird. The Photoshop work in the lower right 1/6 of the image is--to put it as gently as I can--terrible. Please post the original image; I am guessing that you might have cloned over the near foot....

[Scott Frye]

This is the original -- foot still is not sharp -- I double checked the specs and they are right --

[denise ippolito]

Scott, I shoot most of my bird images at a minimum of 400 ISO- even my still shots. This has improved my images a lot. I think that when a bird moves it's foot we may see it as slow but it is motion blur and a faster SS should help with that. I like the pose and the top portion of the image. I think that cloning water is difficult but practice does make perfect-well at least better:).

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks for posting the ORIG Scott. I would have left the beach as is. Cloning wavelets is not somewhere I like to go :) Good advice by Denise.