Nice feather details and what I suspect is a rare subject to photograph. It may be my tired old eyes but the birds eye seems a little soft to me. I guessing the focus point was on the back. I'd have been tempted to up my iso a tad in order to allow me to stop down a bit to insure more of the subject would be in tack-sharp focus. Then again I might've been so excited at getting to photograph the bird that I wouldn't have thought of it. ;) You didn't mention if this was hand held or shot from a tripod. If hand held you did a good job of holding the camera still considering the shutter speed and focal length.
Grrrr, Bob. I don't know what's with my eyes, but you are absolutely correct. I didn't see the soft eye yesterday (maybe it's softening over time :p ) . Actually, these guys are pretty common out here. I've just never seen a youngin up in the top of a tree before. I know I took a few. I have to go back and see if the eye is sharper on another.
Nice image, Ian, although as was noted earlier the eye and front cheek area are both quite soft.
The image feels a little overexposed to me so I increased the contrast and then brought up the shadow a bit on his right wing. I would go with a vertical crop as the foliage in the BG on the left side doesn't really add anything to the image. This gets the bird's eye close to the ROT's position and let's him command a bit more room in the frame.
Nice pose. Subject is not as sharp as would hope and seems that a combination of improper AF aquisition and noise reduction is the problem. I always wonder why noise reduction is used, especially at ISO 400 or lower. The most likely culprit is underexposure. Whatever the cause NR invariably reduces detail to one degree or another. Sometimes you really don't have a choice and you need NR, especially on backgrounds, but only if you've done your best to push exposure, used as low an ISO as possible while still avoiding such things as blurred images due to too slow a shutter speed, while maintaining a proper DOF. Regards~Bill
Ian- Some soft images can be brought back with some sharpening- many can't and the result looks somehow forced. I ran a 100%, radius = 0.5 Smart sharpen on the whole image (would normally have done the subject) and one extra shot on the eye with the Sharpening tool at 100% strenght, and the image responded fairly well I think. I would try using the 400/5.6 on a tripod to see if you can nail the sharpness. The hardware you are using is capable of a very high degree of image quality.
Juvi BCNH pretending to be a crow
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