wildlife In-Flight Green Heron - Click image to view larger!

A truly extraordinary capture. The light is especially fine not to mention the breath-taking clarity. Very nice!

Tim

Thanks for the kind words Timothy!  It's a bit of a small crop but the great lighting make up for that. If the bird was closer or if I had the 1.4x TC III on it would be much better .

Well that 500 mm is doing very well for you! I did not notice any compromise of quality in the crop. I have a 70-300L but often wish for the kind of reach you are getting here as I like shooting birds as well. When I crop it down to get an image like this there is significant loss of quality. I regulary scan Craigslist for a 400mm prime to get a bit more reach with quality. 500mmL is a bit out of my budget right now but I hope the 400 will give me a better situation. Anyway...again great work on this.

Tim

wonderful catch!

Thanks Tim! I think a 400mm lens will work better for you if you use a 1.6 cropped sensor. My 500mm on the 1.3 sensor of the 1D III is at 650mm and a 400mm on 1.6 would be at 640mm . Another thing that I've done that make this image better is that I clean the background noise (around the bird ) with Noise Ninja.  This image is sharp and clear but at 100% expansion and crop the noise does show some and I have Noise Ninja as a plug-in to Photoshop which I just seletct the background and run noise reduction on the background (but not the bird). I generally don't like to shoot over 500 ISO to keep noise level low, btw.

Thanks Su! 

Looks like you were panning.  Very nice image.  I've only seen one or two green herons here in Washington in the last 10 years where GBH are extremely plentiful. 

Thanks David! Yes, I pan a lot most of the time. I was shooting Tern and this bird fly by, hence, I pan along to get the focus lock and took 4 shots. All came out well since the lighting is so good lately in the morning (most weekend).