Some bird shots C&C welcome

It was a cold sunny day today so I decided to try to make some bird shots to test my Pentax A 70-210mm lens.

Shots were made with/at :

Pentax K100D Super
SMCP A 70-210 lens at 210mm
ISO : 200
Aperture : 4.0
Shutter-time : see Exif (Camera was set at Av)






I personally like this one, only it's a bit out of focus on the bird (but I'm happy with the accidental good timing ).

[Snowcat]

These pics are nicely composed, well catched, but i guess they are nearly 100% crop from images, they look way too blurry for me... You definetely should get someting like Bigma (50-500) for this kind of shots...

[vievetrick]

I have to agree with Snowcat. Those birds are tought to get close and cropping in as much as it appears does not do your shots justice. Good start though.

[CJSpangler]

I agree with the others - they look a little blurry. You may need more reach or possibly may need to tweak focusing. A few shots the branches in the foreground look more infocus than the bird.

Good start though. You may want to try to manual focus to see if it helps any. The one of the bird flying is a nice capture though.

[Cloudy Wizzard]

Originally Posted by CJSpangler

I agree with the others - they look a little blurry. You may need more reach or possibly may need to tweak focusing. A few shots the branches in the foreground look more infocus than the bird.

Good start though. You may want to try to manual focus to see if it helps any.

they ARE manually focused since the Pentax-A 70-210mm doesn't do AF

but you are correct, some have the branches more in focus then the birds (hard to get the focus correct). You should see the pictures I didn't select (they were even worse ).

Originally Posted by CJSpangler

The one of the bird flying is a nice capture though.

Yep, I'm fairly happy with that one (only it's a bit out of focus).

About the "100% Crop" comment by some of the other posters ? So what do you mean ?? should it be better to scale down the size of these pics (like to 75% or 50%) to make them look better ?


About the lens, I've found a Sigma lens 50-500mm at my local store but it's a bit over my budget at the moment.

Sigma 50-500mm EX DG F: 4.0-6.3 Pentax AF

[rogerstg]

Nice shots. To get better focus you might want to stop down to maybe 5.6 or more to get a better depth of field. You can safely raise your ISO to 400 or more to accomplish this if you want to leave your shutter speed as is.

BTW, your exif info has been blocked on these shots.

[Cloudy Wizzard]

Originally Posted by rogerstg

Nice shots. To get better focus you might want to stop down to maybe 5.6 or more to get a better depth of field. You can safely raise your ISO to 400 or more to accomplish this if you want to leave your shutter speed as is.

Tnx for the info. I'll try to think of that the next time (maybe wednesday).

Originally Posted by rogerstg

BTW, your exif info has been blocked on these shots.

Hmm, could Photoshop CS3 be the cause of this ??

I think I croped them in Lightroom and then did the "save for web/device" in lightroom (to prevent them from beeing to big). Maybe it's better to just do it from Lightroom.