The limit of my capabitities... Osprey

[Stephanie C]

Hi, Can anyone tell me what else I could have done to sharpen up this shot? I'm wondering if I've missed something or if it was just the limit of my abilities, the conditions and the camera.

It was a really overcast morning and just after sunrise. I found that I had to overexpose the sky a bit to get much in the way of detail in the bird. (A tiny saturation increase brought back a bit of the colour that was bleached out due to the overexposing.) I had the iso at 400, which I personally feel is about the limit of my camera before things start getting too grainy. Aperture as open as I could, which combined with the zoom gave me a too small dof (I think). I had the shutter speed as slow as I possibly could, which I also think is a bit to blame for the blur. I'm just wondering if there is anything else I could have done to get a clearer pic. It frustrates me every time I look at this one, because I love the shot, but it's just not sharp!

This is an old shot, but I am hoping to be returning to the same place soon and want to be prepared...
Thanks for any help.


Camera Canon EOS 1000D
Exposure 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 300 mm
ISO Speed 400

[KurtM]

I'm no expert, but I'd sure have to think your shutter speed of 1/40 is awful unforgiving, particularly for a handheld shot at 300mm. It looks like you have room to kick it up a notch or two before losing the darker plumage detail too terribly, although I thoroughly understand that shooting wild birds doesn't give you a lot of time to play with settings. But that's the only thing I can think of, assuming the equipment is trusty (I like to blame my lens, heheheh).

At any rate, I don't think the photo is a disaster by any stretch, especially considering you just have to "takes what you gets" with birds all too often. Heck, I think it's a wonderful shot!

[Hill Country Hack]

I agree about this shot not being a disaster. You are asking a lot to handhold at 1/40 with a 300mm focal length.

[sk66]

Well, you are at "equipment limits"... You will never get "fantastic" shots from a prosumer zoom (f/5.6 @ 300mm)..it's doing everything it can and it doesn't do so well at the extremes.

Plus, SS is very slow and if that's a FF image you couldn't have been more than 20ft from the perch/nest...NO DOF....

The only "easy fix" I can suggest is fill flash...even with the pop-up detuned a step.

[inkista]

This is just me, but I would've gone for iso 1600. I tend to stay around 800/1600 a lot while birding. I prefer noise and no motion blur to motion blur and no noise. One you can fix to a certain degree in post, the other one, you can't. Yet.

With ISO levels, the biggest issue is getting proper exposure, and most specifically avoiding underexposure. Since most people use the higher settings like 800 and 1600 only in low-light situations, they tend to severely underexpose, and this exaggerates the noise, and then they're programmed into thinking that high iso => massive noise. If you expose properly, you can mitigate a lot of this.

Spot metering, obviously, is another tool you could use to help you deliberately blow the sky and get feather detail on the bird. I think you did ok, actually, but you are definitely at equipment limits, there.

The only other options (aside from flash), is to simply forego shooting the bird until the light/angle is better. I know. You can almost never walk around to the other side and get the bird to turn around. But avoiding backlit subjects makes a huge difference in terms of how much you end up struggling. Harder to do than it sounds, though. The excitement of just seeing the bird tends to override such trivial concerns. It's like not taking your 4,000th bird butt shot. Takes a while to master.

[sk66]

Originally Posted by inkista

This is just me, but I would've gone for iso 1600. I tend to stay around 800/1600 a lot while birding. I prefer noise and no motion blur to motion blur and no noise. One you can fix to a certain degree in post, the other one, you can't. Yet.

+1. Don't know how I missed that bit.

[KurtM]

Noob sez: I'm unclear on how you determine the OP is at the limits of the equipment...?

[inkista]

Originally Posted by KurtM

Noob sez: I'm unclear on how you determine the OP is at the limits of the equipment...?

Attend, young Padawan. It's all in the EXIF and the description.

Originally Posted by Stephanie-C

... I had the iso at 400, which I personally feel is about the limit of my camera before things start getting too grainy. Aperture as open as I could.... I had the shutter speed as slow as I possibly could ...

Camera Canon EOS 1000D
Exposure 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 300 mm
ISO Speed 400

Stephanie said that she was using her lens "as open as she could", so we infer that the lens's maximum aperture is f/5.6. It can't go any wider. So there's no more light to be gained there.

Her shutter speed was 1/40s. With a 300mm lens, the rule of thumb to avoid camera shake blur is to shoot with a shutter speed of 1/focal_length or faster. So, ideally, she should have been using a shutter speed of 1/300s or faster. If the lens has IS/VR, however, we can cut that down by two stops (maybe three), so ideally, she should have been at 1/75s or faster (1/300 -> 1/150 -> 1/75). So, she's still pushing it, shutter speed wise, and if that osprey had moved at all, subject motion blur would have certainly asserted itself.

So, no more light to be got by slowing the shutter speed.

ISO was the only setting that could have been shifted to get more light into the scene and help raise the shutter speed. She was at iso 400, assuming that going higher than that would give her too much noise. Had she been at 1600, she could have raised the shutter speed to 1/160 (1/40s -> 1/80s -> 1/160s = iso400 -> iso800 -> iso1600), which wouldn't have been ideal, but would still have been better, and might have increased the sharpness.

But overall, there's simply not enough light, here.

[KurtM]

Good heavens, I may even understand all that some day! Seriously, thanks for taking the time to explain it, I promise to re-read it, and study harder, and be a good boy, etc., etc.

[Stephanie C]

Thanks for the replies and the advice.

I'll definitely try the higher ISO next time. I must confess to being guilty of using the high ISO's mainly in very low light, thus exaggerating the grain. I think you're right about my brain associating the two.

My camera is a baby in the big wide world of DSLR's and is only equipped with the kit lens' with no IS. With that in mind I think I did well too, (for this shot, but the other 6 were AWFUL!), but when the pic is viewed in a larger size the mistakes are evident.

And it's true what you say about waiting. But when he was sitting there looking at me so nicely, I just couldn't stop myself!

Thanks again for taking the time! really appreciate it.