August 13
This juvie Least Sandpiper was photographed on the dreary morning of Denise Ippolito's Jamaica Bay workshop. Canon 800mm f/5.6L IS lens with a 25mm extension tube and the EOS-1D Mark IV. ISO 400. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/640 sec. at f/5.6. Lens micro-adjustment -4. Central Sensor AI Servo Rear Focus AF active at the moment of exposure.
Small crop from top, bottom, and front. Lost another bird's feet top left corner.
Don't be shy; all comments welcome.
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Nicely done Guru, loved the angle, the vegitation adds nicely and the feed pose with the raised feet works well..
Nice low angle, good feather detail, and a nice pose. Great exposure and sharpness. To my eyes it looks like it needs some CW rotation
O.K. I won't be shy. This is what I strive for! Lovely lighting on the main subject (in spite of dreary am), highlighting details and colors for this sandpiper and providing a highlight in the eye, to engage the viewer. The bird is clearly focused on feeding with an intense posture and raised foot. Just enough detail & color in the foreground to anchor the bird, fading into a blurred bkgd with shades of subtle coloring for interest but no visual competition. Pretty perfect for me.
Nice low angle, raised foot and interesting environment, but the head looks over sharpened and even though there is a catch light in the eye it appears rather flat. Do agree with the rotation. The one piece of grass the is touching the raised foot kind of bothers me.
Gary.
Ben and Gary, What are you seeing that indicates the need for CW rotation? Gary, that grass bugs me now that you mentioned it....
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Wonderful alert pose, with raised foot and water drop a bonus. Great exposure and detail. Bird nicely separated from BG. I also felt it needed a little CW rotation. Sharpening looks just about on the edge - might back off just a tiny bit on the head. All in all, though, a very handsome shot.
Hi Artie, the LRC appears to be raised higher than the ground under the bird, he appears to be in a valley. If my eyes are seeing correct the water should not pool in a higher area. Has nothing to do with the bird itself. Does that make sense?Originally Posted by Arthur Morris
Gary.
Very nice. I agree with a bit of CW rotation. The raised foot and water droplet are always ingredients that make the image a success!I like the spalsh of green the grass provides. Sharpening is not my fortebut it looks OK to me!
Artie, this is completely off topic but who is member #2!! Just wondering...
Gail
It looks like the light was nice and soft.
I like the angle, eye contact, raised foot and the droplet of water on the tip of the beak.
The plumege looks nice and the whites and the rest of the plumage have great details.
The 1/640 s stopped the motion, no blurring of theraised foot which is good IMO.
Great picture, Artie.
Artie. I thought the same as Gary. Plus, I felt that the apparent focal plane on the ground indicated the same.
Hi Art, nice to meet on this forum
Last edited by Jay Sheinfield; 10-02-2011 at 06:20 PM.
you captured a great moment, i can see the attitude of the bird, he know you are here watching.Why the primaries and tail are out of focus? is for movement or deep of field?great picture
Lovely juvie Least. Love the nice colours on this fella. Techs and processing are of course top notch. My first instinct was also that it needed a bit of CW rotation...the streaking in LRC and faint streaking in the BG all seem to go up from left to right...perhaps just creating an illusion but still worth a try to see if rotation would be good.
Gail, member #2 is Captain James Shadle
Gorgeous bird and excellent pose. Processing looks excellent to me.
It might be an illusion, but it does appear to need CW rotation. I would remove the blade of grass touching the bill.
I had the opportunity to photograph Least Sandpipers for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I don't know why, but the heads appeared over-sharpened straight out of the camera :) Don't know if the plumage has something to do with it.
Well noted. I agree. Thanks for the explanation. Not sure if I have to go back to square one to fix it....
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Jay and Raul, Thanks for your comments. Depth-of-field in with super-telephoto lenses is measured in tiny fractions of an inch. Increases in d-o-f that come with going to higher ISOs and smaller apertures are also tiny and are often barely noticeable. In addition, the smaller apertures result in slower shutter speeds which result in more images lost to subject movement.
In light of the above I have--for the past 28 years--been largely working at the wide open aperture, focusing on the bird's eye, and letting the d-o-f fall where it may
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Art, Thanks for response. Since I do very little super telephoto work, I just didn't know
YAW. In large part it is a matter of style and personal choice. Good to see you spreading out!
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Since technology has improved significantly in the last 28 years I personally think shooting wide open is not the way to go and I try to avoid it as much as I can. Firstly even with your Canon 800 f5.6 on the Mark IV when your subject is 10 meters away, DOF will be 4cm when shooting at f5.6 and 5cm when shotting at f8. The extra 1cm is quite significant when photographing such small birds. In this case pushing iso from 400 to 800 could have given you the extra light to go f8 instead of f5.6 and gain some more DOF to include the tail. Going f10 could have given you 7cm DOF from the same distance !!Jay and Raul, Thanks for your comments. Depth-of-field in with super-telephoto lenses is measured in tiny fractions of an inch. Increases in d-o-f that come with going to higher ISOs and smaller apertures are also tiny and are often barely noticeable. In addition, the smaller apertures result in slower shutter speeds which result in more images lost to subject movement.
In light of the above I have--for the past 28 years--been largely working at the wide open aperture, focusing on the bird's eye, and letting the d-o-f fall where it may
Secondly, most long lenses are sharper at f8 than at f5.6. I would highly recommend anyone to avoid shooting wide open if possible especially when using teleconverters as it would help sharpness significantly and improve the DOF.
Just my 2 cents.
Last edited by Ofer Levy; 10-03-2011 at 08:45 AM.
Ofer's numbers are correct but somewhat misleading. The 1 centimeter increase in d-o-f represents 1/2 in front of the point of focus and 1/2 behind. As the eyes of most birds are relatively close to the centerline of the bird's body we are losing close to half of the "extra" d-o-f which works out to about 2/10th of one inch. I much prefer image quality at ISO 400 to that at ISO 800 with any camera body that I have ever used including the Mark IV. So I will continue to work wide open most of the time with my super-telephoto lenses while focusing on the eye, will continue to enjoy the softer, more de-focused, more pleasing BKGRs that have been the hallmark of the style I have been using for close to three decades, and will continue to enjoy the higher quality image files. My way of approaching this has been working OK last time that I checked. As I said above, "In large part it is a matter of style and personal choice." Just my two cents.
That said if I am working with either and f/2.8 or an f/4 telephoto lens I will usually work at f/4 and f/5.6 respectively.
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I am not sure 'misleading' is the appropriate term. Firstly, no one says you have to focus on the eye. I tend to focus a bit behind the eye and get the maximum from the available DOF. As to the difference between IQ at ISO 400 and ISO 800 when using the Canon Mark 1D Mark IV in my opinion is not that big at all. OOF tail or leg is much less desirable in my opinion than a slight difference in IQ.
Shanna Tovah...
Happy new year to you and yours as well. As usual we will need to agree to disagree. At least we have grown to be able to do that peacefully now
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
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Artie, pose is excellent. loved the droplet as well....rotation will help in my opinion as well. excellent habitat shot.
I am fine with your choice of f-stop here but that is because of the BG. stopping down might have made the bokeh worse. If the BG was super clean, then agree with Ofer that stopping down wud have been better. I dont mind the tail (when it is further away than the head) out of DOF range...but feet out of DOF range bothers me. In this one, am not sure if they are out of DOF range or just motion blurred.
For me, this is one of the more frustrating topics that comes up when an image of this type is critiqued. No offense intended to anyone but there is only so much you can do with long or macro glass. I too follow the "shoot for the eye" approach with long glass. I cannot agree with cranking the ISO to 800 so that the f stop can be set to f8. Even with today's technology shooting at ISO 800 is noisier than shooting at ISO 400. Noise is not image. Not image is not desiredJay and Raul, Thanks for your comments. Depth-of-field in with super-telephoto lenses is measured in tiny fractions of an inch. Increases in d-o-f that come with going to higher ISOs and smaller apertures are also tiny and are often barely noticeable. In addition, the smaller apertures result in slower shutter speeds which result in more images lost to subject movement.
In light of the above I have--for the past 28 years--been largely working at the wide open aperture, focusing on the bird's eye, and letting the d-o-f fall where it may
There is another reason to shoot long glass wide open- At f4 the 600 mm lens produces the nicest background of any lens imho. It's so smooth and buttery that just about everything in the background blends away leaving you with a nice "canvas" for your subject (if you choose your background correctly). Dial down to f8 and you begin to lose the smoothness. The 800 imho does not produce as nice a background as the 600 and it's dof is brutal so I tend to leave my 800 in the box unless I know that getting close is not an option (which is another topic in and of itself. Long glass is no substitute for getting close).
With super macro, for instance when shooting with an MPE 65mm lens, it's a balancing act. Even stopped all the way down DOF is nothing at 4x - 5x.
Good topic.
Last edited by Michael Lloyd; 10-11-2011 at 08:23 AM.
For the most part I agree Micheal but I do like many of the BKGRs that I get with my 800 :). My suspicion is that the distance from the subject to the BKGR has more to do with it than the lens....
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
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