Large Vermilion Flycatcher (Pileated Woodpecker)

[CM Prince]

I was at Brazos Bend SP in TX yesterday morning taking pictures of Vermilion Flycatchers.
When this Pileated Woodpecker landed in front of me.
All C&C welcome

NIKON D90, 50-500mm lens, fl 500, f 13, 1/250, iso 400, MF, tripod.

[Randy Stout]

CM:

Always fun when you get an unexpected visitor. Exposure looks good except for perhaps a bit overexposed in the red channel. Interesting tree, nice view of his foot.

The biggest problem for me is that the image quality is pretty soft. I don't know if this represents a big crop or perhaps a focusing error.

He is also angled away from us a bit.

Did you have any luck with the flycatchers?

Cheers

Randy

[Arthur Morris]

Nicely framed and yes to the over-saturated REDs but either this is a huge, huge crop or you did something very wrong with the image optimization. Image quality is poor at best.

[Doug Brown]

Always fun to get an unexpected visitor! Do agree with the others about image quality though.

[CM Prince]

Randy, Arthur, & Doug

Thanks for taking time to comment on my picture. I don't know where it is my eyes or screen, I just don't see all of the things in these pictures.
In most cases the pictures posted by other look good to me, I don't see the problem till someone bring it up.

I have upload the raw file of the woodpecker.

If anyone of you have time to look at it and tell me what I am doing wrong it would be great.

Thanks in advance

CM


http://heavensmyhome.com/Birds/DSC_1267.NEF

[dankearl]

CM, It was a huge crop, about impossible to do.
This is about 50%, not a bad image, but still a bit much of a crop.
If you can't get closer, try to make them a bit more of a Landscape photo.


DSC_1267.jpg

[Doug Brown]

Thanks for providing your RAW file. There are a couple of factors hurting your image quality. First of all, as Dan pointed out above, the crop is huge. The bird itself measures only 560 pixels tall. You'll get much better image quality with more pixels on your subject. You used a zoom lens at maximum zoom to get to 500mm; a lot of the folks here opt for prime 500mm lenses which unfortunately cost a lot of money but do pay off with excellent image quality. You were stopped down to f/13 and I suspect that diffraction reduced your image quality. And your shutter speed was pretty slow for a Woodpecker, as they never seem to sit still. I would have traded a bit of aperture for a faster shutter speed. I like what Dan did with the crop; the shot works much better when you include some environment. Keep up the good work!