C&C on 7D and 100-400 lens.

First off, man that background is smooth.

The Bird must have been a long way from the background to get it that smooth. Good job.

Is the bird sharp? Yes and no. It does look as if the head is fairly sharp, but not much of the rest of it is. Maybe a bit of the breast.

You say you sharpened and cropped these. Is there a way that you can post the full sized shot? I'd like to see how far you cropped, and what else you may have done to it.

You were fighting a lot of bad things that were going on. Mostly it has to do with the light. These 7D's seem to like a lot of light.

Although it's cloudy, the bird still seems like it's back lit. If you try to lighten the areas under the wings to much, that will dull the image even more. Looking at this bird, it looks to be a young one. Sometimes the young are tough to tell if they're sharp or not cause they are normally fluffy.

As for the iso, shutter speed and aperture, yeah a little more iso wouldn't have hurt it, but I don't like going over 400 with this camera. At iso 400 you would have gotten around 1/400 for a shutter speed. That should be plenty for a stationary object.

I took a shot with practically the same settings as yours, but I had a lot of sun hitting the bird, but none the less, it can be done. (and I did with a 300mm with a 2x tc)

So if you could post either a full sized shot, or a link to a full sized shot, without any post work done it, I'd like to take a look at it.

And for those who say that you can't get a good shot with those settings.

Just cause they can't doesn't mean you can't.

Ok, my shot was at 600mm instead of 400mm, and of course I was using an inferior T3i.

Click Original size.

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Dave
http://davev.smugmug.com/