shooting tight

[John Chardine]

This little male Blue-winged Teal- an endemic duck of the Americas- was very interested in the sound of another Blue-winged Teal coming from my iPod. I was hunkered down on a boardwalk at water level and he approached to have a look. He came pretty close and so the 7D I borrowed from my friend and BPN member Dan Busby laid a lot of pixels down over the subject and rendered the detail seen here. A small amount of sharpening brought it out more. This crop left about 1/3 of the original pixels. Of all the factors affecting image quality, shooting tight, either by using good field technique or magnification (tele lens, teleconverters) or both, provides perhaps the most bang for your buck.

Comments welcome!

Date: 7 May, 2011, Time: 1229h
Model: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: EF500mm f/4L IS USM x 1.4 tc II = 700 mm
Program: Manual
ISO 640, 1/400s, f/7.1
Exp. comp.: 0.0
Flash: off

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

John,

Greetings. Really like the detail & color of this tight shot... a little detailing on the left edge of the neck and a bit off the top (taking the aspect ratio out of square) would work for me... but a mesmerizing shot.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Kerry Perkins]

John, I like the closeup detail and the moody light here. I can see the overcast sky in the eye! Very nice portrait and example of getting in tight. I don't feel the crop as being square at all - the posted image is 943x800.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

I don't feel the crop as being square at all - the posted image is 943x800.

Kerry, Ha! Right you are... funny it looked square to me before... I guess I've been looking at too many human portraits lately, but an 8x10 crop (from the top) looks best to my eye (The OP is a bit squarer than 8x10)...

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Stan Cunningham]

Nice shot John! As usual.
So I'm assuming you cropped 2/3 of the original out then?
Sorry for a dumb question, but how do you determine how much you cropped, or how much you can get away with? Just the eye on IQ?
Stan

[John Chardine]

Hi Stan- There was about 5mp left after cropping which means there was 27% left from the original 18mp 7D image. I made a mistake by saying 1/3 (33%) because I forgot I was using the 7D and not my 1DIV!

I guess I do determine how much I can crop by eye. If the techs are good on the image it is possible to crop significantly and still maintain IQ. I find the combination of good detail and low noise allows pretty heavy crops with the 1DIV. If you can keep the noise under control, this applies to the 7D as well. However, cropping to a small subject is a bit of a trap because it does not promote the development of your field skills and it only really works for posting to the web- you won't end up with enough pixels to print a reasonable image unless you then use some form of up-sampling.

[John Chardine]

I agree, some off the top would be good. I'll experiment. Thanks for all the comments.