Flying High

Eastlands (e2 Member)

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16 Apr 2012 - 5:41 PM

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Keep at it as this is a superb image, the good thing about digital is that you can fire off loads of shots and like the rest of us if you are lucky you might get one or two really good images. It is very difficult to keep all of the subject pin sharp but you have done very well to get detail throughout and wonderful capture of the wings. For wildlife photography you will probably need to consider a larger lens ( something like 70-200 mm or more ) which I know is not always easy as they can prove expensive but if you look around you might get something suitable, John.

Constructive Critique!

DRicherby

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18 Apr 2012 - 9:43 AM

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This is a great attempt. In-flight shots are seriously hard: doubly so with small birds because they move so fast.

The problem with using a short-ish focal length and cropping is loss of resolution. To take a frame-filling shot of a small bird like this usually needs a lens in the 500mm range. Unless the bird was flying very close to you, your shot at 100mm has something like five times the width and five times the height. The area of interest is only a twenty-fifth of the frame so, when you crop down to that, your 12MP camera has suddenly become a 0.5MP camera. Resolution suffers, and quality with it: the blur on the head is almost certainly a resolution problem, possibly combined with the head being slightly out of focus. (But, at 105mm, f/8 should be giving you more than enough depth of field to get the whole bird sharp.)

How to improve? First, recognise that you're trying to do something extremely difficult and one good shot out of a hundred might not be so bad. The key to improvement is practise and I suggest you start with something easier. Larger birds fly more slowly so practise on gulls and pigeons until your hit-rate goes up. Pan with the bird, use tracking autofocus (Canon calls it "Servo AI" mode; I don't know about Nikon) and continuous shooting mode to take three or four shots at a time. Practise using longer focal lengths, which makes panning more difficult because you need to be more accurate. As your skills improve, try again with the smaller birds and you should get better, more consistent results. But this kind of stuff is always rather hit-and-miss so practise pressing that delete button, too!

By the way, I think that "ugly" didn't notice you're already at 1/3200s and it's not possible to go much faster than that!

Dave.

Constructive Critique!