Show your Bird Portraits

becceric · Jul 4, 2022

My wife and I have been enjoying a few Mallard and Merganser families on the local river Here are a few images.

Click · Jul 4, 2022

Very nice pictures. I especially like the second one. Well done.

becceric · Jul 4, 2022

becceric said:
My wife and I have been enjoying a few Mallard and Merganser families on the local river Here are a few images. View attachment 204485 View attachment 204486 View attachment 204487 View attachment 204488 View attachment 204489

Click said:
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.

DanP · Jul 6, 2022

I'm unable to positively ID this Flycatcher. If anyone knows what it is, please let me know. It was too far away to get a decent picture, so I only took it for ID purposes. Geographically located near Vancouver, BC.

Thanks.

josephandrews222 · Jul 6, 2022

AlanF said:
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

bhf3737 · Jul 8, 2022

DanP said:
I'm unable to positively ID this Flycatcher. If anyone knows what it is, please let me know. It was too far away to get a decent picture, so I only took it for ID purposes. Geographically located near Vancouver, BC.

Thanks.

Perhaps a Gray Flycatcher.

DanP · Jul 9, 2022

bhf3737 said:
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).