White-Tailed Eagle Encounter with OM-1 and OM 150-600: Micro Four Thirds Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review (2024)

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Great shots! I saw my first of the species this past winter in Hokkaido, Japan. During my research on the flight up, I read that these birds are often described as "flying barn doors" due to how they coast with their wings held level, rather than at an angle. "Ridiculous!" I thought, until I looked up in the sky the next day.

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The compositions are nice, but the images are low resolution and very very soft.

Did you have to do extreme cropping to fill the frame with the subject, or were they just resized badly?

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UrbaneHobbit wrote:

Great shots! I saw my first of the species this past winter in Hokkaido, Japan. During my research on the flight up, I read that these birds are often described as "flying barn doors" due to how they coast with their wings held level, rather than at an angle. "Ridiculous!" I thought, until I looked up in the sky the next day.

We are now regularly seeing these down here in Dorset as they visit Poole Harbour and Christchurch Harbour. Several overflying our garden, definitely barn doors, especially when the local buzzards try to see them off and look so small

Wonderful creatures

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Will Rose wrote:

The compositions are nice, but the images are low resolution and very very soft.

Did you have to do extreme cropping to fill the frame with the subject, or were they just resized badly?

Yes, all images are cropped more or less heavily. Shooting distance aprrox. 70 m / 230 ft. This was not a prepared shooting with camo or from a hide. No resizing.

These guys here are very shy compared to many Bald Eagles in North America.

northern_nature wrote:

Will Rose wrote:

The compositions are nice, but the images are low resolution and very very soft.

Did you have to do extreme cropping to fill the frame with the subject, or were they just resized badly?

Yes, all images are cropped more or less heavily. Shooting distance aprrox. 70 m / 230 ft. This was not a prepared shooting with camo or from a hide. No resizing.

These guys here are very shy compared to many Bald Eagles in North America.

I can see from the properties, that apart from the first one which is cropped to 900 something on the long side (and probably too small for printing), the others are at between about 2000 and 2500. Those should be Ok for an A4 print.

I don't know if you are in a position to take more shots which might be sharper, or if these were a once in a lifetime opportunity, as I think happens to most of us sometimes with bird shooting. If these are the only shots you are likely to have of it, I would look at your PP technique.

Were these shot RAW? what PP have you done? I did a very rough and ready pass through Topaz AI for the last shot, and I got something which I think would be much better for your album I will not post without your approval, though.

I would be very happy if I had got these, I have never seen this Eagle....I just don't live in the right place.

Well done

tom

Tom, thank you for commenting. I processed the ORF file with Lightroom Classic:

- AI Denoise

- Sharpening 20 pts up

- Low lights up individually

- Some minor color tweaks

Please feel free to post your proposal and your thoughts.

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Will Rose wrote:

The compositions are nice, but the images are low resolution and very very soft.

Did you have to do extreme cropping to fill the frame with the subject, or were they just resized badly?

They look really good to me. It's strange how we see things so differently.

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Will Rose wrote:

The compositions are nice, but the images are low resolution and very very soft.

Did you have to do extreme cropping to fill the frame with the subject, or were they just resized badly?

Those are pretty good at that distance. Perhaps you can illustrate what good looks like with your bird shots at 70m.

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Hi and thanks to all for your comments. I am pretty satisfied with these images regarding the distance. The outcome with my PL100-400 was even much softer under these conditions.

I just checked the series I captured and found an image slightly sharper in the head area and developed with a bit more fine-tuning.

northern_nature wrote:

Tom, thank you for commenting. I processed the ORF file with Lightroom Classic:

- AI Denoise

- Sharpening 20 pts up

- Low lights up individually

- Some minor color tweaks

Please feel free to post your proposal and your thoughts.

You obviously have done some pretty comprehensive PP and I think the newer versions of LR Classic with AI stack up fairly well (I moved away from LR when Adobe forced the monthly license regime upon us)

You may not like the image below, it is never good in my experience to do AI sharpening on an image that has already been tweaked, and I would normally start with the RAW or JPEG conversion with no enhancement.

However, this is what I came up with for better or worse...DP review makes it hard to assess as you either see a smallish image or one which is at least 100%!

Best of luck, I hope to see more nice photos from you

tom

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