Desert Wheater

[Supreet Sahoo]

Specs
Canon EOS 7D + Lens EF300mm f/4L IS USM + 1.4x
Tv 1/1250
Av 7.1
EV -1/3
ISO 200

Location - LRK
Date- Nov 2011

[Mrudul Godbole]

Lovely catchlight. I liked the composition. The low angle adds to the image. Increasing the brightness a bit would be good. Was the light very harsh? Thanks for sharing.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

The eye contact is nice. Nice to see this species.

Can you tell us about the processing. Did you do any cloning to the background? How much of a crop is this? I am not sure where was the focus point? I am not too happy with the sharpness. Did you upload a file larger than 300kb or longer than 1024 pixels?

The blacks have lost details.

[Supreet Sahoo]

The eye contact is nice. Nice to see this species.

Can you tell us about the processing. Did you do any cloning to the background? How much of a crop is this? I am not sure where was the focus point? I am not too happy with the sharpness. Did you upload a file larger than 300kb or longer than 1024 pixels?

The blacks have lost details.

Hi Sabyasachi,

This is what i usually do-
Crop
Resize
Levels or curves
Brightness/contrast
Vibrancy
Saturation /hue
Sharpness

I have attached the original image for reference with the focus point. Im sure that it was not 300kb but it could have been more than 1024 pixels. At the same time i can assure you that there was no undeclared bg cloning.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Supreet,
It is good to see the original frame. One can now understand the scene better.

Since the Auto Focus point is large in the frame, it often focuses on the high contrast areas. And even though the AF point appears to be on the body, the plane of focus is not exactly passing through the bird. In this case, it looks like the focus is slightly ahead of the bird and is locked on the dead grass stalks. As you had f7.1 and this is a relatively large crop, the depth of field is there, however, not fully covering the head.

Remember, with a relatively shorter focal length one will face this issue. With longer telephoto lenses and getting close focus of a bird will not result in these challenges. However, take it that those who start with shorter focal lengths and move upto longer telephoto lenses letter, normally get better in their craft (there are exceptions to the rule though). In these situations I use manual focus.

Sharpness is a function of accurate focus, shutter speed, stability. Also things like flare etc reduces contrast and resolving capacity of the lens. In this case, the shutter speed was fine. The focus being a bit ahead makes the bird not sharp. Sharpening has resulted in sharpenign artifacts in the fine feathers which are often mistaken for sharpness.

Are you processing in photoshop or lightroom?

I prefer lightroom as I want to directly work on the RAW. I normally don't crop. However, one can select the crop in the raw file and then do the editing and export to the required file size (by specifying pixles in horizontal and vertical). So one doesn't need to work on the jpeg. Working on the jpeg reduces the quality.

The DPP (Digital Photo Professional) of Canon is also a good software. It doesn't give the ability to place a copyright on the top. Apart from that it is a good software and I suggest that you try that. Among all the softwares, the noise reduction is very good in lightroom, as well as the cataloguing.

My only concern is that young guys these days spend most of their time in post processing rather than spending it in the field.

[Supreet Sahoo]

Supreet,
It is good to see the original frame. One can now understand the scene better.

Since the Auto Focus point is large in the frame, it often focuses on the high contrast areas. And even though the AF point appears to be on the body, the plane of focus is not exactly passing through the bird. In this case, it looks like the focus is slightly ahead of the bird and is locked on the dead grass stalks. As you had f7.1 and this is a relatively large crop, the depth of field is there, however, not fully covering the head.

Remember, with a relatively shorter focal length one will face this issue. With longer telephoto lenses and getting close focus of a bird will not result in these challenges. However, take it that those who start with shorter focal lengths and move upto longer telephoto lenses letter, normally get better in their craft (there are exceptions to the rule though). In these situations I use manual focus.

Sharpness is a function of accurate focus, shutter speed, stability. Also things like flare etc reduces contrast and resolving capacity of the lens. In this case, the shutter speed was fine. The focus being a bit ahead makes the bird not sharp. Sharpening has resulted in sharpenign artifacts in the fine feathers which are often mistaken for sharpness.

Are you processing in photoshop or lightroom?

I prefer lightroom as I want to directly work on the RAW. I normally don't crop. However, one can select the crop in the raw file and then do the editing and export to the required file size (by specifying pixles in horizontal and vertical). So one doesn't need to work on the jpeg. Working on the jpeg reduces the quality.

The DPP (Digital Photo Professional) of Canon is also a good software. It doesn't give the ability to place a copyright on the top. Apart from that it is a good software and I suggest that you try that. Among all the softwares, the noise reduction is very good in lightroom, as well as the cataloguing.

My only concern is that young guys these days spend most of their time in post processing rather than spending it in the field.

Most of this actually comes as news to me as im very new to digital photography. However after joining this forum I do not favor PS a lot. Most of the editing that i do is done in DPP itself like basic post processing and then transferred to PS for some sharpening etc and obviously adding the copyright. Ill try to get lightroom.