[SSGGeezer]

Here are a few shots of a little downy woodpecker at my suet feeder. She went back and forth between the trees to avoid me as I re-positioned, but her greed got the better of her. I think I got a good kit DAL 50-200. The camera is beautiful also. Let me know if you agree on the quality of my lens. Shot as a JPEG and cropped in Pencil Sheep with no other external processing. Also a picture at F-9 of a well cover that has aged poorly, also no post processing other than cropping.
Thanks in advance for your comments on the lens, etc.

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Last edited by SSGGeezer; 06-12-2017 at 05:59 PM. Reason: Add photos.

[normhead]

Interesting, is there a picture of the woodpecker?

[SSGGeezer]

Here are the pictures after a bit of a brain fart uploading.

[SSGGeezer]

Interesting, is there a picture of the woodpecker?

Here is another one of her.

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[normhead]

ON the wood pecker shot, the chain and the highest bars of the cage look pretty sharp.

If you were focused on the bird you need a focus adjustment. I always use the eye to judge focus or sharpness. For me I only make these decisions without looking at a pixel peep near the eye.
This tells me if the lens is sharp, but it also tells you ig you missed focus. I always look for a part of the image that does look sharp. If part of the image is sharp but your subject is not,, it's a missed focus. If none of the image is sharp it may be motion blur. But it's darn hard to evaluate a lens from a web sized image, in any case.


It's hard tp say for certain without pixel peeping but your bird looks soft. But it also looks like a missed focus.

[SSGGeezer]

I had the autofocus on and did not have it set to single point. It was on 5 point along with Jpeg rather than Raw+. I was just testing it out and after only a phone camera, (Good for a phone, but....) I was just so very happy to have real optical zoom. Even with single point auto it may have missed since she was spinning the feeder around a bit. I will try a manual 50MM prime tomorrow and see if I can get focus peaking to do its thing for me.
Thanks for the critique, I have a lot to learn just to get the basics down. All the software options are another learning curve. maybe an extension class. Your boy was enjoying his suet! That is an amazing shot Norm.

[normhead]

Thanks, on shots like this I always use a single focus point and try and get the eye in focus. I can live with parts of the rest of the bird being out of focus because of depth of field issues, but it's very rare i keep an image where the eye isn't sharp.

[aleonx3]

I don't proclaim myself to be a "birder".. but often times I would rather have the bird come to me (my excuse for not using long fast lens ). This one I did recently was snapped with the DA18-135 on the k-3.

I agree with Norm that you may have a slight FF problem with the lens or perhaps some minor error in focusing. But you did good nonetheless. When catching something moving such as this, make sure you use continuous shooting mode so you can fire several shots in succession. In fact, in this case, I got 4 or 5 shots all in focus.