Birds 2012

[agorabasta]

Birds are often seen against bright sky or bright water.

Which doesn't mean that you can recover detail much below the haze level.

But there's a good question of 'how much below the haze?'. The answer is that the threshold depends on ISO or, more specifically, on the photon noise (shot noise). So the higher the effective ISO, the less detail can be recovered below the haze, as the haze is pure photon noise without any 'real signal'.
And so your words of ISO400 you see as a threshold make a lot of sense in that it really quantifies the haze you had to deal with then. But you definitely could have countered stronger haze had you been able to use ISO50.

[johna901]

I've been very interested in all this birds 2012 thread. Last April, I took the attached shot of gulls with my 70-400G on my A700. The lens was set at 360mm, ISO 200, 1/1250sec @ f6.3, 1400 x 1050 crop (re-sized to fit 1048 x 1048 reqirement of this forum). I'm looking forward to trying the 70-400 on my new NEX 5n with LA-EA2 adaptor, but the weather is diabolical here at the moment.
JohnA.

[artington]

That's a marvellous shot, John A. Is ihis at some sanctuary? Agree about the weather - i have a tree down right behind the back door!

[johna901]

Thank you for promt response and compliment. It was taken at Minsmere RSPB reserve in Suffolk.
John A.

[Dr. Harout]

I agree with Artington. Marvelous shot, indeed.

[Birma]

Wow - a lot of Bird activity already in 2012.

Hope you keep plugging away Mark - there are some interesting birds you are finding - I like the Tree Creeper. (I think the Coal Tit may be a Great Tit?)

The performance of AF on the 70-400 with the A77 does seems a bit disappointing - I look forward to the ongoing investigations.

Lovely Black Headed gulls John - great action shot .

[Greg Beetham]

Very nice Seagull capture JohnA, I haven’t seen them with the black head (breeding), according to my bird book there is quite a few listed that develop the black head during breeding.
Greg

Ps David are you developing a new sport...extreme photography (a quite entertaining segment though).

[mvanrheenen]

Hi John,

Great shot of those gulls! They can make quite a fuss when there is more than one of them around Your image shows just that! Good capture. I agree about the weather, it's very cloudy and stormy here now. No fun for shooting birds.

Is the RSPB you mentioned the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? I don't know the organisation, but use their website a lot for looking up the common English name for the birds I identify and post online. Great site with lots of information about the birds!

@Birma, I'll keep going as I find chasing those birds to be very relaxing in my stressing day to day activities. You might be right about the Tit. This maybe a mishap in my translation (again!). In Dutch, these birds are called Koolmees, the word "Kool" is the Dutch word for "coal" (and cabbage, but I never sam a Cabbage Tit before ). Maybe that's what made me assume the correct English name would be a Coal Tit.

I have to pay more attention to my translations! Thanks for pointing it out

[Birma]

Hi Mark - I think you do very well translating the birds into English . There is a Coal Tit and a Great Tit in the UK. Just had a look on the RSPB site (very good as you say) and this shows both, with the Coal Tit's key feature being the white mark on the back of the head, and the Great Tit having a much brighter yellow underside. A Cabbage Tit would be very interesting to see .

[DrScottNicol]

I'm not much of a Bird Shooter as I'm not that great at tracking them in flight.. these are more my style

A55 / Sigma 50-150 lens.







Scott

[DrScottNicol]

lovely gulls shot, JohnA

[mvanrheenen]

Wow, quick response Birma

Thank you for the compliment. I think you identified the bird correctly. I'll change the English name, thanks!!!

A cabbage tit would be an odd sight I think

@DrScottNicol: nice shots, although I hope you're kidding about the dead pigeon being more your style. Did you take the phrase "bird shooting" a bit to litteral maybe? Just kidding. Nice shots!

[DrScottNicol]

David,

very interested in your posts on the A77 - I'm experiencing similar issues, albeit more via trial and error than any systematic investigation. Basically, whilst I love the way the camera handles, I'm a bit nervous using it for anything important at the moment because I find the results unpredictable compared to my a55. By that I mean sometimes I'm at relatively low ISOs and am disappointed by the noise / level of NR I have to apply to clean them up, at other times / conditions the high ISO shots clean up nicely, on a par with the a55. Similarly I find my lens collection behaves very differently on the a77 compared to the a55. The 16-50 kit lens and 70-300 G are well behaved on the a77 (and close to 0 in terms of the micro adjustment scale) whilst the sigma 50-150 and zeiss 16-80 require significant adjustments and even then, the hit rate in terms of focus just doesn't quite seem to feel acceptable compared to how they behave on the a55 - the a77 is perhaps just much less forgiving of my own small errors and thus exaggerates them... at first I thought it was hand shake issues but after some pixel peeping, I can see the focus is just slightly front or back of what it should be, just not in any systematic way. Maybe its just a confidence thing - I've shot a lot more 'real world' shots with the a55 in a wide range of conditions and I think I now have a good feel for its limitation and work around them accordingly - hopefully in a few month I'll feel the same way about the a77. To be fair, since I've picked up the a77 a dull grey cloud has descended upon me (weather wise) whenever I've gone out to shoot - a few days of good light working with the a77 might reassure me as to its IQ reliability.

Scott

[agorabasta]

JohnA, your gulls look just exceptional! Seems like skill and luck together with proper place and time all played their best into the result... Truly outstanding!

[DrScottNicol]

@DrScottNicol: nice shots, although I hope you're kidding about the dead pigeon being more your style. Did you take the phrase "bird shooting" a bit to litteral maybe? Just kidding. Nice shots!

I feel that stunning / chloroforming your subject is a legitimate and under appreciated photographic technique.. although admittedly I find its less popular when I try it with people in studio portraits / urban street scenes

Rest assured the above pigeon was just a fortuitous immobile subject as I was walking from the car park to a wildlife sanctuary in Reading where I took the other shots.

Scott