Show your Bird Portraits

Hi Folks.
For various reasons I haven't been able to get to look here for a while, 4 or 5 pages! There are so many great images that it is going to have to suffice to say a general nice job folks, also the discussion re 5Dsr vs 1DxII with examples has been interesting too, thanks.
Hi Josjan,
Nice shot, welcome to the forum.
Sorry Quick Click, beat you to that one! ;D

Cheers, Graham.
 
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nc0b said:
I shot this today as I arrived at my at my rural home on the Pawnee Grassland east of Ft. Collins, CO. It was quite some distance in the sky above me as it flew around my acreage. 5DsR, 400mm f/5.6, 1/800, f/9 & ISO 400. Exposure set +2/3rd stop to compensate for the bright sky. It is a 100% crop that is significantly less than 1 megapixel. It is hard to get within a few hundred feet of my semi-resident raptor. If perched, it tends to take off as soon as it sees me.

Beautiful shot. 8) Well done.
 
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Hi Candyman. Yes the hawk was shot handheld, as are all my wildlife shots here on the Grass Land. The bunnies are pretty tame, the jack rabbits much less so, and the antelope are almost impossible to get close to. What is frustrating is as the distance gets greater, the thermal distortion in the air softens the images. The antelope shot was at 96 degrees F last weekend, 700 feet away in the neighbor's horse pasture. It just isn't crisp like I wish it were. This shot is also a 100% crop, 5DsR with 100-400mm II and 1.4X TC III at 560mm equivalent. 1/800, f/11, ISO 800. On the other hand, getting a tight shot of one of our resident bunnies was easy during dinner on the porch. There is some subject to shoot every weekend. The bunny was modestly reduced due to the file size limit.

What puzzles me is how the proud owners of big whites cope with thermal issues. Going to Africa on a safari and having soft images due to thermals would be very frustrating. I have shot a windmill to the south west at temperatures in the 80s, 60s, and 40s, and even in the winter the imaged is distorted.
 

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Thank you very much :)
I prefer the fourth picture. I like how calm the bird looks. Even though there was actually a lot going on. I took about 350 pictures. The most of them were blurry, had only parts of the birds in them or no bird at all ;D
And sometimes they made kind of a strange face ;D
 

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This is a set of portraits of a cuckoo - the first I have ever seen. Initially I had my 70-200 F4LIS but was able to get home and pick up the 100-400 MkII and get some more shots.
It spent some time on a dusty path looking for grubs and the second shot is it skipping down the path - I hope to get a shot head on but it was way too shy for that.
 

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Mikehit said:
This is a set of portraits of a cuckoo - the first I have ever seen. Initially I had my 70-200 F4LIS but was able to get home and pick up the 100-400 MkII and get some more shots.
It spent some time on a dusty path looking for grubs and the second shot is it skipping down the path - I hope to get a shot head on but it was way too shy for that.

The last one is very nice.
 
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