Brandon Marsh

A few from Brandon Marsh yesterday, where I was hoping to see a kingfisher.


I watched a heron on the edge of the water and it seemed more interested in the bushes than the water. After about 15 minutes stalking, it darted into the bushes and came out with a vole.




The water level in the marsh was pretty low, as this view from one of the hides shows.




It took a while, but I finally spotted a kingfisher flying low over one of the pools. Eventually I figured out where it was perching - almost too far away for a picture.




I enjoyed watching for a while, and eventually it flew to a perch a bit nearer.

They look rather soft to me? If that's your Bigma in the hide shot I'd recommend stopping it down to about f8, a sharp grainy shot is better than a blurred one.

I agree, they are quite soft. I had a 50-500 that was soft at anything longer than 150mm; I swapped it for a 150-500 and this is very sharp. The last image above looks quite similar to the type of shots my lens produced; it has a slight halo around bright objects.

It's worth trying what Steve has suggested as I've read a lot of good reviews on this lens and it should be capable of taking good, sharp images.

Regards
David

They are just overcropped IMO. I don't think you can crop to near 1:1 and expect to have acceptable results - there's a point where you just have to accept that the subject is too small in the frame. For me that's at about a 50% crop.

Thanks all, I think you are probably all right. All the subjects were smaller in the frame than I'd have liked, so they are pretty tight crops, and I shot wide open because I wanted to keep the shutter speed at 1/1000 and I didn't really want to push the iso any higher. I had plenty of advice to stop my lens down when I bought it (its actually a 120-400mm Sigma), so next time maybe I should worry less about noise.

As it is I tried some noise reduction in pp, which has probably added to the softness. Might be one of those times when the pictures are technically off, but they do at least give me some record of an interesting day.