Clicked last weekend, I noticed that this GBE was coming to one perch with prey in its mouth time and again. I parked my car parallel to the perch and waited for it to come to the perch again. I later on noticed their nest (in mud holes) near by.
removed bkgr noise & adjusted some curves in pp.
Camera Canon EOS 7D
Exposure 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture f/8.0
Focal Length 400 mm
ISO Speed 400
Lens used Canon EF 100-400 F4.5-5.6 L IS USM
excellent work! nice composition, and sharpness. Coming down to f5.6 might have yielded a cleaner (even more OOF) bkg, although as is works for me too.
Thanks. Its not at all a big crop. The frame here is about 85% of the original. Cropped out some from right and top.
Not sure of the sharpness issue. Active focus points were on eye and its throat. I set sharpness to maximum in my camera. Any sharpening that I apply in PS gives out a lot of grain in the image.
What I do is shoot in RAW, apply a little sharpening to the RAW file. Then convert to jpg. Reszie the jpeg to web size. And then do a small amount of sharpening of just the bird.
I dont think you should be setting sharpness to max in camera. If you are shooting RAW, that does not matter anyways. But to me, this does not look like an image with sharpness set to max. You have mentioned that NR was done only on the BG. Is some default noise reduction turned on in camera or in raw converer? Also make sure your lens is not front or back focussing so that can be ruled out..