An Ol' Fashioned Barn Raisin'

[tombennett]

They're building a much better nest than last year.

I'm feeling a little happier this afternoon. This is my faithful 17-85 set at 85mm, I know I'm pushing it a bit here. A high ISO of 5000 as I 'm in the house looking through the window so light is a bit of an issue. The shutter speed was at a blistering 1/3200 with f/5.6 as my only option, the subject about 15 feet away. Still not really sharp, I've been looking at Tamron 70-200 after doing a lot of reading. Anyway I like the image, so I thought I would share it.

If I have a wider aperture, say f2.8 I assume I will get much more of a blurred, uniform background, would this make the pigeon pop a little more?

home-building.jpg

[tesarver]

Re: An Ol' Fashioned Barn Raisin'



Tom

[colin C]

Re: An Ol' Fashioned Barn Raisin'

Your problem is looking though the window.

Window glass isn't anywhere near optical quality and it will degrade the image. If you have double glazing it will degrade it twice as much.

Try again with the window open.

[tombennett]

Re: An Ol' Fashioned Barn Raisin'

Hi Colin,

Ah that might it then. Difficult as my windows won't open in the right way to get the shot from the front of the house, I'll sit in the sitting room with the french windows open tomorrow morning and catch them coming out the bush they live in.

Thanks, I should have thought.

TomB

[Hereford_EOS]

Re: An Ol' Fashioned Barn Raisin'

If I have a wider aperture, say f2.8 I assume I will get much more of a blurred, uniform background, would this make the pigeon pop a little more?

In theory yes, but that depends on the distance of the subject to the background.
Here the pigeon is 15 feet away and the wall 20 feet away, normally at f/5.6 you can obtain a reasonable background blur but the subject is too close to the background to make the bird stand out. If the wall was another 10 feet away then it would look better.

As the bird is flying towards you then you could of used a slower shutter speed than 1/3200.
At 1/1000. f/5.6 you can use ISO 1600 or even 800.
Cropping a large amount from the LHS would improve the framing as there is too much dead space and not enough space for the bird to fly in to.

[tombennett]

Re: An Ol' Fashioned Barn Raisin'

Yeh, I see what you mean Stephen, so he is flying into the shot.