Small birds in flight

Image Critiques Avian Critiques
1

towhee in flight copy2 copy234.jpg
towhee in flight copy2 copy234.jpg2572×2033 1.37 MB

flying goldfinch_DxO-Edit 2b copy.jpg
flying goldfinch_DxO-Edit 2b copy.jpg4504×2928 1.36 MB

I did notice the banding on this one so I will go back and re-process it later. I haven’t seen the banding in a long time and I’m not really sure why.
I went back to the original image, a JPEG, and there’s no evidence at all on my iPad of any banding. However, just to be sure, I selected the background and feathered the background by 100 pixels. Still made no difference. So it appears that the banding is a result of posting on NPN. Are you aware of this and what do you do about it?

Critique Style Requested: Standard

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Description

in-flight shots of birds get a lot of attention. These are taken out my bedroom window several years ago. I specifically wanted to get small birds in flight. Here are two small birds but I was able to capture probably taken with a Nikon D 500. My guess is the lens is500 mm. And that was typically shooting small birds at minimum of 2500 of the second and probably faster. I always use auto ISO. Would see my success rate is Not that great. These two birds are good examples.

Specific Feedback

anything that would be of help to me as a photographer

Technical Details

these pictures were taken a long time ago and I no longer have any of the data on them. first first merge is a Towhee, and the second bird is a goldfinch.

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2 Likes
2

I see some evidence of banding and a few cloning artifacts on the towhee image. Noise suppression looks too heavy due to the presence of some waxy looking patches on areas of the bird. Banding can be caused by LED lighting and sometimes by high speed flash. The lighting is very bright and the shadows on the goldfinch look like fairly strong flash was used. If you dare try to get more shots, do not use flash for flight shots. Even with an accessory battery, the camera will reduce the number of frames shot per second to accommodate the charging up of the flash. Also use 1/3000 minimum to freeze most of the wing motion. The results of your work look promising due to the difficulty of capturing small birds in flight…Jim

3

Both shots are pretty spectacular, David. Even though it looks like you had to deal with extreme noise in the Towhee shot, the pose and that super red eye make that shot special. The Goldfinch is also nice, but I think it does look flashed due to the shadow cast on the body by the near wing. If the banding wasn’t in the original, you might want to do a resize on this before you upload it. It looks like the size is 5400 pixels in the long direction and the shrinking algorithm to make it fit the standard size may not be the best, though I do see it in the large image as well. Resizing it to 2000 pixels or so in PS or LR will let you use a higher quality setting to keep the file size down and might work. Just guesswork as whenever this comes up no one seems to have a definitive answer.