What's for lunch . . . . . Fish!

[Trader]

I have been watching and shooting a family of Osprey raise their young for some time now. Today when we drove by the nest to check on them there was no one home. My wife suggested that we drive by the lake and see if they were there. The lake is, Lake Monroe in Sanford, Florida and only 1.5 miles from the nest so we went and this is what we found:

All of these images were shot with a Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G Zoom Lens set to Infanity and processed in Photoshop CS4.

There are more images Here. As always, Thanks for looking.

[Fred flyfisher]

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm sushi. Great photos, I love the series.

[smc1377]

OWN3D!!!


(can I write that? Haha.)

[Heaterguy]

Really nice shots. I have the same lens but seldom use it because of the vibration I get. What shutter speed and ISO did you use if you don't mind me asking?

[Trader]

Originally Posted by Heaterguy

Really nice shots. I have the same lens but seldom use it because of the vibration I get. What shutter speed and ISO did you use if you don't mind me asking?

It was a slightly overcast day and I had a lot of harsh light. My ISO was set to 200 with a white balance of Cloudy. I was shooting at 1/350th of a second and f/9.5. In post I did a crop for subject, shadows/Highlights adjustment of 50%, and a Levels adjustment to clip the high and low end of the histogram that had no data.

This is what one of the images looked like with out any processing in Photoshop.

[Heaterguy]

Wow. You really nailed the pp technique. I think my problem is that I am shooting in aperture mode rather than shutter mode. I think I will try the lens out this weekend shooting around 1/250-1/500 to see what results I can develop.
Thanks very much for sharing.

[Trader]

It seems like in the back of my mind I remember one of my instructors saying that if you are zoomed out to 200mm the slowest shutter sheed you should shout at is two times that unless you are shooting with a tripod. Anyway I don't have a problem with that lens and I use it a lot. I usually shoot manual and nothing below 1/250th. Give it another try, it is a nice lens.