Show your Bird Portraits
- Thread starter 1982chris911
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My 300mm f4 IS never lets me down.
Untitled by RexPhoto91, on Flickr
Untitled by RexPhoto91, on Flickr
Untitled by RexPhoto91, on Flickr
Untitled by RexPhoto91, on Flickr
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Practicing BIF shots with my heron friend today (even though the background shows a construction site, he is not a crane ;D). Most of the shots were really bad ( I still have a long way to go) so these are the best of the lot. Suggestions/comments welcome. 7D/ 70-200L f/2.8 II.
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serendipidy said:
Using a 7D these are very nice shots. In my opinion you would benefit most from using a full-frame camera with fast auto-focus and better per pixel sharpness than the 7D delivers. Using the same lens you will end up having to crop a bit, but that will allow you for example to keep the tail and feet of the bird in the frame easier than with the tighter framing of a 7D. This should yield visibly better results, but I must admit there is a substantial price tag attached, because I am thinking of what good a 1D-X or 5D Mark III might do to you.
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Thank you AmbientLight for your kind advice. I think you are right about FF since I was having a lot of trouble with the 7D obtaining focus and also keeping the whole bird in the frame. One day I hope to upgrade to the 5D3 or something similar in the future. 
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serendipidy said:Thank you AmbientLight for your kind advice. I think you are right about FF since I was having a lot of trouble with the 7D obtaining focus and also keeping the whole bird in the frame. One day I hope to upgrade to the 5D3 or something similar in the future.
What lens are you using? I use a 70-300L with a 7D for birds in flight and would just use less zoom than buy a new full frame body. The auto focus of the 7D is more than adequate for sharp birds in flight when used with a fast enough shutter speed. If birds are flying laterally, it's hard to get a high percentage of keepers, but with the 7D's frames/second, you should get some. Do you use back button focus in servo? That change helped my "keep" rate a lot.
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Krob78 said:
Krob - very kind of you to say that but as you know with photography often it's just the luck of being in the right place at the right time. I'm visiting an island bird colony at the end of the month so will hopefully have some good shots to show from that.
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CTJohn said:serendipidy said:Thank you AmbientLight for your kind advice. I think you are right about FF since I was having a lot of trouble with the 7D obtaining focus and also keeping the whole bird in the frame. One day I hope to upgrade to the 5D3 or something similar in the future.
What lens are you using? I use a 70-300L with a 7D for birds in flight and would just use less zoom than buy a new full frame body. The auto focus of the 7D is more than adequate for sharp birds in flight when used with a fast enough shutter speed. If birds are flying laterally, it's hard to get a high percentage of keepers, but with the 7D's frames/second, you should get some. Do you use back button focus in servo? That change helped my "keep" rate a lot.
Hi CT John,
I started out using my 100-400L but I was usually shooting in the late afternoon and often it is overcast and cloudy then. The light was not bright and so I had low shutter speed and large apertures to keep ISO <800. The focus and IS on the 100-400 was not great. So I started using my recently purchased 70-200L f/2.8 ii for the f/2.8 focusing speed. I also was often too high on the focal range on the 400mm and the 200mm made me not zoom in so much which helped like you suggested. I have never tried back button focus (I'm an old guy who is very timid or slow to try new things) but I know I should learn that technique. Also, I need to practice panning skills. The heron was flying both laterally and towards me at the same time. I was using AI servo, expanded or manual select center zone AF, high speed continuous shutter, and AI Servo tracking sensitivity on "slow". Are those the correct settings to use? Thanks everyone for any advice.
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