You need to get closer for that, not to crop.
How do you process the images? There seems to be too much noise reduction that eats all detail and too much sharpening that adds "worms".
Extreme cropping like you're doing will never make an image better. The eye of the bird in the sample above is only about 50-60 pixels across which hardly seems enough for a "crisp" definition of the eye. No way you're going to get any feather detail with so few pixels. Bird feeders are a terrific place to practice so continue hanging out around the feeder. For focusing, use the smallest, single AF point you can. I tend to sway my body back and forth when holding a heavy lens so I found continuous AF works better for me.Hello, I have a new fuji 55-200 lens and I've been experimenting to see if I can crop in to get clear bird photos. I can't, and I don't know if it's the distance or the lens or my settings. Here's what I'm getting. These are taken at 200 mm. Any suggestions? The first was closer than the second. Thank you.
Cropping is not a way to get clearer photos. Cropping reduces resolution and increases noisiness.
Well it partly the lens' fault in that it is only 200mm. If it were longer you'd fill more of the frame at that distance. It is also the lens' fault in that it isn't the sharpest lens available. For getting sharper images, reducing the distance is probably more important, but most people who take bird photos use a longer effective focal length.
For cropped perched birds, try reducing your shutter speed down to about 1/320 or 1/640. These extreme crops to less than 1/6 of the original frame are adding nearly three stops of noisiness to your images as well as reducing sharpness. At this point I think noise is having a more deleterious effect than motion blur. If you didn't have to crop, then you might be able to keep to shutter speeds up to better avoid feather blur.
Before you do that, set up your camera to shoot JPEG+raw and set your in-camera JPEG "noise reduction" to -2 and "sharpness" to +1. This will give you a baseline JPEG file to see if your LR processing is better or not.
Mega-improvement and a very nice action shot. It will only get better with practice. Your new 100-400mm lens will make things both easier (less cropping) and harder (requires better camera holding technique).Thank you very much for your suggestions. I am experimenting a lot. I do better through the kitchen window, but when I'm outside I'm having a hard time. I'm going to set up some practice targets tomorrow and pretend they are birds! Interesting about LR. I'm going to try to keep editing light in LR. Here is one I shot today from the kitchen window.
