Nice shots peter. I tortured myself for the last 2 days trying to shoot Red Tailed Topic Birds (which are small and mostly white) against white clouds in flight. AF was really poor even with good light simply because there was no contrast and the birds were flying really fast. Took me nearly 5 hours on 2 days to get some acceptable shots. Will post them later once I PP. Thanks for sharing your insight!
Vishnu
surfnron wrote:
I like to "see" your thought process Peter.At this size, the eyes do look sharp ~ Ron
Well, Ron, they do....but when I look at the 100% crop, then I see that the critical focus point ended up slightly ahead of the eyes. Mind you, it is not possible to control that sort of thing at all......you see a bird approaching very fast, raise the camera/lens and aim at the bird, bump AF once of twice if you have the time for that, fire 2-3 shots and it is over in 2 seconds.
The fine focus placement from the tip of the bill to the wing leading edge is largely random.
On the following image you can see it perhaps more clearly......200 f/2 IS was used wide open, the duck was some 12-15 ft distant, and all I could do was to aim the centre AF point at its forehead....in this case there was enough DoF so the eyes turned out reasonably sharp.
moonyguy wrote:
Nice shots peter. I tortured myself for the last 2 days trying to shoot Red Tailed Topic Birds (which are small and mostly white) against white clouds in flight. AF was really poor even with good light simply because there was no contrast and the birds were flying really fast. Took me nearly 5 hours on 2 days to get some acceptable shots. Will post them later once I PP. Thanks for sharing your insight!
Vishnu
Thank you, Vishnu. I am really looking forward to seeing your shots.
Some fine work with pigeons!!!!! The keeper rate is low but with high speed digital you can capture enough to get a few good ones. I enjoyed your close-up merganser. Don
DonGut wrote:
Some fine work with pigeons!!!!! The keeper rate is low but with high speed digital you can capture enough to get a few good ones. I enjoyed your close-up merganser. Don
Thank you, Don......I've got that very merganser for you today in my new thread.
