Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
I was out at the local pond and saw this crow chasing this hawk away. Then a jet came by and I tried to get all three.
Canon 5DsR, 70-200mm, 2x extender ISO 3200
Very cool, John. It’s always interesting to see the smaller birds chasing the larger and the jet is a nice addition. Focus seems off in both images, which I’m a bit surprised at as AF usually works pretty well shooting against a blank sky. You mentioned that you don’t have Photoshop or equivalent-it might be worthwhile investing in one of the processing packages-there are a lot of them available these days. The noise is pretty bad in the lager versions of these images, not surprising at iso 3200 with that (or any other) camera and the processing software can do amazing things to reduce it these days. Most of them have a 30 day free trial available so you can play with them and find the one that feels most intuitive to you.
Thanks Dennis, yes, I saw the focus is off on this one. I was caught off guard and was too fast on the shutter, but I wanted the jet in there, I’ve had Photoshop for the past 3 years, subscription unexpectedly ran out. I’ll be going back to PS soon. I have a ton to learn about it and I know it would have helped on this shot. All considered, it was fun to watch the crow chase the hawk away.
You have a nice flying pose of the hawk, but as Dennis mentioned it could use some noise reduction. Neat shot of the crow dive bombing the hawk. It is fun to watch the interaction between the smaller birds and the larger ones.
Your absolutely right Allen. This was a little fun I wanted to share. The Hawk flies in circles as the crow dive bombs back and forth. Hard to take good shots and watch, LOL. I’m short on ADOBE but soon I’ll run this thru PS . Thanks.
Ok, I did some noise reduction with Topaz DeNoise AI and lightened up the shadows with Shadows and Highlights in Photoshop. There’s still quite a bit of noise, but looks better to the eye. This is quite a crop and the sharpness suffers. 3200 ISO is a bit heavy and contributes a lot to the noise profile to this photo. Exposing the image to the right will help reduce the noise in the shadows. Extenders will help pull in the subject closer, but often reduces sharpness. Red-tailed hawks are fairly slow so you could have dropped the shutter speed down to about 1/1200 seconds for this slow moving hawk. And that will enable you to drop the ISO down too…Jim
Jim, Thanks for all the help on this. I like what you’ve done with the shot. Now that I just reinstalled PS, I’m going to ck out Topaz DeNoise AI.
I was not ready for the shot. I just happened to look up and there he was so I started taking shots without checking things. I just recently started using an 2X extender. I was unaware of the sharpness loss it would cause. Yes the crop was a bit much. I’m not sure what my shutter speed was. Usually I don’t have this much noise at 3200 ISO but I see it well enough in this shot.
Given the size of the crop, that came out amazingly well, John.
Thanks Dennis. Given your status, I respect what you write. Jim showed me what he could do with Topez and PS. So, I downloaded both software and took another shot I had taken of the Redtail. I’m impressed with Topez. I think it came out pretty good for my first time with Topez. I thought the crop would have messed up the chance of a half decent shot. If I could make it sharper would make this a really good shot. I tried in PS. This is best I could do.
Any thoughts would help.
