These are superb starlings I captured at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. I took this with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto, and that meant depth of field was a challenge because the birds were perched at various distances from the camera. I shot this in 2007 with my first serious digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and noise was a significant issue then. Therefore, I wanted to keep the ISO down, but that in turn meant I couldn't shoot this with a small lens aperture. As a result, the birds at the far left and far right were almost sharp, but not quite. It's the eye that needs to be critically sharpl, so I selected the eyes of both those birds and used Filter > sharpen > unsharp mask to make them appear more crisp. My settings were 1/320, f/4.5, and 200 ISO. Had I taken this today with the Canon R5, I would have used 1/500 at f/22 with 3200 ISO. In 2007, 3200 ISO on the 1Ds Mark II was unusable.
0 Comments