What technical feedback would you like if any?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
All comments welcome!
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If backgrounds have been removed, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
This was taken a few seconds after my original post a few days ago, as the first fledgling had emerged from the nest hole and the second was about to. The second one crawled out and was promptly attacked by the first one out. I don’t think any major damage occurred and after they got out of the way a third emerged safely. Canon 1DX2, 600mm f/4 + 2X, ISO 800, f/14 (needed for enough DOF), 1/200 sec (needed for flash sync), exposure from two off-camera speedlights. Cropped top and bottom, basic adjustments in LR and into PS to add a little canvas on the left.
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That’s some very cool interaction Diane. The image looks overflashed to me and despite the high F-stop you used this causes the birds to look a bit pasted onto the background. I typically dial in at least -1.0 flash exposure compensation when working during daylight like and usually more like -2.0 FEC>
Thanks, Nate. I was hemmed in here. The birds were in deep shade all day, and too high to get much reflected light from the ground. The only way to get more natural lighting was to go to a very high ISO where dynamic range and grain would have been prohibitive for detail. (Wide open I was at f/8 and that limited DOF too much.) And if I had been able to do that, the BG would have been blown out. By using flash for main light I also gained an effective ss of about 1/8000 sec. I would normally be happy to be able to use flash for fill light.
Nice behavior and action shot. You have gotten a lot of detail at 1000 mm. Aspect ratio also looks good. Well done.
This image and the last are very cool images. Love the action from the woodpeckers. Good for you for planning and working through the shot.
Like Nate, this image (and the last) feel heavily flashed. I read through your rational for the settings.
I don’t know how far away you were, but using a 600 with a 2x, I took a guess and used 200 feet in my calculations. At f/8, your total DOF would have been 3’11 7/8". (Near at 198’ and far at 202’ - focused at 200’). At f/14 your DOF was 7’ 1" . Looking at the image, you need maybe 6" of depth to keep the birds sharp. Even if you were only 100’ away, you would have had about 1 foot of depth at f/8, more than enough.
I don’t know what FEC you had dialed in, but with 2 speed lights with flash modifiers like better beamers attached, -2 would have been the minimum I would have dialed in.
Easy for us to be arm chair quarterbacks after the fact, but those are my observations.
The distance scale on the lens read 60 ft. I don’t know how accurate it is but that is close, from pacing it off. DOFMaster says the DOF at f/14 would have been 0.61 ft or 7.2". I have always felt the value used for the circle of confusion has not been adjusted to keep up with the higher resolution of today’s lenses and sensors, compared to film days. This post can be enlarged enough to show there is sharp focus on the tail and foot of the bird on the right and it is already falling off on the attacking bird. Its tail is behind the focal plane and its wingtips are in front. Its head is reasonably in the plane. And with less flash power the BG would have quickly been blown. Before I added the second flash I was using f/11 and getting even less DOF, and having to deal with balancing some overexposure on the sky with some underexposure on the dark birds.
DOF quandary solved. When I posted this and the previous image, I was not paying attention and relied on the EXIF data in LR, which shows 1200mm, but in fact I had both the 2X and the 1.4X on (connected by necessity with a 12mm extension tube), so the focal length was 1680mm. (I found an iPhone shot I had done of the setup in place to be sure.) In that configuration, the camera does not see the 1.4X. That gives quite a bit less DOF, and it accounts for my mention in the first post that I had to autofocus in Live View or manually and then set the lens to manual focus, so it was not possible for focus to keep up with action. Normally I would feel that just using the 2X alone and cropping more would be just as good, and then I would have had AF, but I was hoping to get a little more detail with the extra optical magnification, which I feel I did in that previous post at least. So many trade-offs…
