Loon

[dkippen]

My neighbor loaned me his 100-400mm lens for a photo retreat later this week, so I went out to practice with it.

Because of where I was sitting and trying to get a close-up of loons, I don't have any background for reference. This is straight of the camera - just resizing. It was also fairly windy and tripod was used.

Comments??/Critique??

[gjtoth]

My neighbor loaned me his 100-400mm lens for a photo retreat later this week, so I went out to practice with it.

Because of where I was sitting and trying to get a close-uo of loons, I don't have any background for reference. This is straight of the camera - just resizing. It was also fairly windy and tripod was used.

Comments??/Critique??

It gets lost in all that water, Deb. Needs a some major cropping, no?

[dkippen]

I was thinking of the crop too, but I didn't know how far to take it. Too much??

[jerryph]

One of the biggest challenges one has with long lenses is getting the subject in focus, and shooting fast. An F/5 at 400mm is something like F/3.5 at 150 in terms of depth of field.

This makes getting sharp pics a little more challenging. Another is the fact that at longer ranges, light sensitivity falls off a lot, so eother slower shutter speeds are needed or a very bright day.

What you want to do is to first not shrink the picture, but to crop the area first and then re-size for the web. That way we are not cropping already reduced pics and lose a lot of potential.

Another hint... you shot at F/5.6 and 1/3200th of a second. To get a deeper DOF, I would have suggested something like F/8-F/10 and maybe 1/800th of a second or so. There was more than enough light to do that... and the pic would have come out a touch sharler and had greater DOF.

New lenses are so much fun playing with and you did really well if that was your first time!

[dkippen]

Thank you Jerry - my goal today was just to practice using such a big lens and of course, I was so excited when the sun came out, just had to go. And yes, this was my first time using this size lens, otherwise, I wouldn't be out in the middle of the day in bright sun taking pictures.

I'm going on a photo retreat this weekend and my neighbor offered to let me use some of his lens, so I took him up on his offer.

[Snappers]

Hope you have a great Weekend Debbie.