Show your Bird Portraits

becceric

Making clumsy photographic mistakes since 1980
CR Pro
Oct 30, 2016
413
738
My wife and I have been enjoying a few Mallard and Merganser families on the local river Here are a few images. View attachment 204485View attachment 204486View attachment 204487View attachment 204488View attachment 204489
Very nice pictures. I especially like the second one. Well done.
Thanks, Click! It’s been fun getting these images. I’ve watche the family gather steam to cross the river, feed, then cross back, and find a spot to sleep, but I haven't actually seen any adult Mergansers in the air. Hopefully I’ll get some airborne images some day.
 
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josephandrews222

Square Sensors + AI = Better Images
Jul 12, 2013
608
1,845
65
Midwest United States
I thought I'd give the RF 800mm f/11 a whirl on the R6 because it should give the same resolution as the RF 100-500mm on the R5 and the large pixels on the the R6 would not be affected so much by the f/11 diffraction. I thought the high iso performance would be good, but I was bowled over. I was set up for BIF at 1/3200s and suddenly a small bird dropped by for a second, some 15m away in the shade. This is an 800x800 pixel crop from the centre at iso 20,000 of a Whitethroat.

View attachment 204442
...there is so much to unpack in your wonderful posts in this thread and here.

It would be interesting to see your real-world comparisons (bird images!?) of photos obtained using the R5 (smaller pixels) & the R6 (larger pixels) with the f/11 800 lens...looking for observable diffraction effects on image quality. Your posts here and elsewhere helped catalyze my own efforts on this topic and (at times) I'm not certain what I actually observed! In my studies, simple hand-held shots (various apertures) of our moon in its various phases are as (reproducibly) revealing of the effects of diffraction as anything, in what are essentially gray-scale images.

In a more recent post, you referenced how some noise-reduction software had improved the high-ISO image above.

I would very much like to see the 'original' jpeg...prior to the application of noise reduction strategies
 
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DanP

CR Pro
Dec 8, 2014
126
391
Perhaps a Gray Flycatcher.
Thanks bhf3737.

I went back to the sanctuary today and they had sightings listed for Willow Flycatcher and Pacific-slope Flycatcher. I'm going to guess it is a Willow Flycatcher based on the pictures in my bird book. According to my book the range of Gray Flycatchers doesn't extend to my area (but a tip of their range isn't that far away).
 
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