Blue Heron

[billm]

Shot this today,cc's welcome

[Otavio]

Hi Bill. Two interesting images.

Are they already heavily cropped? If not, I think you could crop a little tighter, so that we could better observe the Heron's details.

Also, they look a bit blurred, so I checked the EXIFs and saw you used a shutter speed of 1/125 for a focal length of 300mm. There is an old "practical rule" that recommends using the inverse of your focal length as a shutter speed (ex.: 300mm; 1/300 seconds). Personally, I like using at least twice that, if light conditions allow me to. So, I would use, for this focal length, at least 1/500, eliminating (or at least reducing) the effect of camera shake. Note: I am considering you shot it handheld.

My 2 cents...

Regards,

[Bobobird]

Unusually turbulent conditions to see a GBH in but makes for a great background.

As Otavio says with birds you need a really high shutter speed. Not only to reduce hand shake but also subject movement. There is imperceptible movement in birds even if you think he is still.

[jprzybyla]

Hello Bill, welcome to CIC. I spent many of my years in and around Manchester, I retired from the Public Works Department. Nice heron, not as many up there as here in Florida. Not sure how serious you are about bird photography but I looked at the EXIF data for the first image, as Bobo wrote you need a high shutter speed. I use a minimum of 1/500 yours was 1/125. Your 100-300mm is very much like the 70-300mm I use. A good rule of thumb for minimum shutter speed for a particular lens is.. the mm of the lens x the crop factor of the camera. In my case 300mm x 1.5 = 450 so I go higher to 1/500. I wrote this before reading the posts above but we all picked up on the same thing... slow shutter speed leading to soft images. Hoping this helps, looking forward to seeing you post more images.

[billm]

Thanks for the replys folks,I was using a tripod and it was almost dark when I found this bird and my lens is an old qaunteray 100-300 it's not very good,I also had jacked up the iso up higher than I would have liked.Hi joe these were taken below kelly falls dam on the piscataqua river.