Canon 7D Canon 100-400 L IS ISO 1600-0.3 1/2000 sec f6.3

[Jonathan Ashton]

Shot taken from my garden hide - sunflower seeds about 2" to the right.
All C & C welcome.

[Jim Fenton]

The fact that almost all of the bird is not in sharp focus and it's looking completely away, coupled with the motion blur quite honestly spoils this for me.

Don't know if you could have set up either yourself or the food source to be more perpendicular to the flight path or not, but that would have helped a whole bunch.

Exposure on the whites looks OK but the BG looks kind of strangely noisy?

Just my 2 cwents

[Gary Esman]

Shot taken from my garden hide - sunflower seeds about 2" to the right.
All C & C welcome.

I Jonathan, the main issue here is the subject is flying way. Run NR on background, sharpened the bird, quick job you could do much better on the raw file.

Thanks, Gary.

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks Gary for the very well done repost. The bird's position may very well been a result of the direction of the breeze....

[Jonathan Ashton]

Thanks for the feedback, I suspected I would be hammered on this one - no problem! The image was noisy, I think ISO 1600 is pushing things a bit too far, we should have some brighter weather this week. The direction of the bird is a moveable feast (hey not a bad pun for this time of the day!) the feeder is about 6 feet from the hedge and the birds arrive from different directions so I get some almost head on and some side on. I have to make the most of what light is available to me but hopefully this week better light will enable me to move the feeder back to an earlier position. I was curious to see what the views were on the image noise, strangely I did not perceive the image to be terribly out of focus - perhaps I was making excuses due to the noise. Better will follow