My bird shots are just horrible! I need some help!

[Mike D90]

The other couple of daft thoughts i had where are you using a filter,if so is it a good one and are you allowing the VR to settle and snap in before taking the picture,with my sigma in the early days i would sometimes take before the VR had settled,you may not get camera shake through this but it doesn't help if the picture is being taken through a moving element.
Cant remember my jpeg settings but i think sharpening was about 7 and picture vivid.

I honestly don't know about the VR. I have it turned on on the lens but I have no idea about it "snapping in". I just get a good focus in my finder screen.

Tomorrow I am gonna go give this lens a workout, with and without tripod, with and without VR, watch my ISO closely and make a bunch of other adjustments and see what happens or changes.

 

[mikew_RIP]

With my sigma and 55-300 i can see the vr settle or/and hear it,a more relaxed session making sure every thing is right will hopefully give you a better impression of the lens and its ability.

 

[Don Kuykendall_RIP]

Don, will you point me to some of your high ISO shots please? Also, if you know where to send me, point me towards some post processing tutorials that might help me.

I have Adobe PS 7.1 and LightZone. Cannot afford to upgrade Adobe PS. I also am not sure I have what I need to work with RAW images. I think LightZone does but I have yet to even use it.

Not on my computer but find my recent post in the d7000 section. Night football game. Some of those were shot at the max ISO for that camera and all were shot with the 55-200 zoom just like yours.


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[Mike D90]

Just a quick check on ISO settings. I placed this computer board across the room and shot several pics with that 55-200mm lens.

I know this is not a good test but the image shows the same nasty noise I see in those bird shots. I think this is going to be an ISO issue.

First shot is at f/5.6, 1/8th sec, 200mm length at 1600 ISO, hand held.





Last shot was f/5.6, 1/4 sec, 200mm length, 800 ISO, hand held.

 

[weebee]

Can you take a shot in macro? Curious how that will look

 

[Mike D90]

Can you take a shot in macro? Curious how that will look

None of my lenses have macro capability. Do you actually just mean a super close shot with the 55-200mm lens?

 

[Mike D90]

These were shot with that lens from just a few feet away but in good natural light. Same shot, just different crops.

 

[Don Kuykendall_RIP]

These were shot with that lens from just a few feet away but in good natural light. Same shot, just different crops.



View attachment 58776

View attachment 58777

View attachment 58778

Those look great. I assume they were shot at a much lower ISO? The D90 just may now be able to handle high ISO


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[weebee]

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? I don't see a problem here. They look crisp. Though I can't enlarge them

 

[dramtastic]

I use ISO-Auto
Aperture Priority
AF-C, 39 focus Points, AF Single Point. AF-C set to release. Piss off the 3D tracking
WB Auto
Shutter Speeds for Birds. I rarely set the minimum shutter speed below 1/500th and you can shoot a lot faster even for stationary bird(they tend to move). Also if you don't have the shutter speed set fast enough you will miss a lot of BIF shots because you have to be ready for the transition between stationary and take off.
I would stop down to F8-F11.
Use back button focus. This is set up in the menu. Assign AF-L/AE-L Lock. AF-S ON.
The following was shot today hand held at 420mm F8 1/3200(yep that fast) ISO 1250. No VR/OS

 

[weebee]

Those look great. I assume they were shot at a much lower ISO? The D90 just may now be able to handle high ISO


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That is what I was trying to figure out as well.

 

[weebee]

Try ISO manual at a lower setting. Can the D90 do this? Also, I think you are making settings that are not needed. I would keep the shutter a touch higher and be prepared for wasted shots. You're right birds are flighty. That's what they do.

 

[weebee]

Birds are never easy.Live it,learn it! I love taking pictures of birds. And other wild life. But birds are a challenge.

 

[Moab Man]

The 3D tracking and the high ISO is your problem. Open your aperture all the way up, bring down that ISO, and go to a single point focus.

If these are very active birds then go to continuous focus.

 

[BackdoorArts]

OK, a coupe things. If you compare the bird feed at ISO 1400 and the Ibis at ISO 1600 a look at the background will show you have a very similar issue with noise. The difference really has to deal with the IQ on your subject, and a white bird isn't going to make it easy to capture all the details you want. Color noise on a white subject isn't pleasing at all, and that's part of your issue. The D90 is a great little camera, but that old 12MP sensor doesn't do noise nearly as well as today's, even when they're more densely packed. I find ISO 800 is the last tolerable setting for me, so your results are not extremely surprising. You can obviously see the difference at lower settings.

If you must shoot at higher ISO's then I would strongly recommend shooting in RAW as you will allow for greater noise reduction in post. Lightroom has a set of sliders that I suspect would do wonders for calming some of the noise, though it's not going to work miracles.

Here's an older piece talking about the D90's high ISO performance as compared to the D300. It will give you a bit of insight. Nikon D300 vs D90 high ISO noise comparison

As for some other factors, realize that Daylight WB will look very cold when shooting in the shade. Cloudy would have been a better choice and given you better colors (something you could more easily adjust in RAW mode).

There's nothing inherently wrong with shooting in JPEG mode, but realize that you need to be far more aware of precisely how the camera is set up to achieve the results you want. Shooting RAW requires a little more time on the back end, but when settings aren't perfect it can save your photo.

 

[Marcel]

One thing I wonder about, were the OP's posted pictures cropped? I suspect they have been severely cropped and when you get to 1600 ISO with a D90, cropping doesn't help and the images degrades very quickly. So you might want to get a longer lens (beware, they are rather expensive) and fill the frame, or try to.

But the main thing I'd like to mention to the original poster is that when you are shooting in the shade in low light situation, there is simply not enough contrast and light to define the birds. If you want crisp clear pictures of birds, you have to have good light. This is why some people that specialize in birding will have remote flash setup to give some depth to their shots. You simply cannot get detail and colour sharpness in low light low contrast situations.

No camera can capture light that is not there. And the most important element of photography is light. Let's just not forget it. So, if you want to go and watch birds when it's grey and raining outside, please do, but don't count of capturing an award winning shot with your camera, whatever camera model you own.

So please take my post with a grain of salt. I'm not trying to discourage anyone, but only trying to put a little bit of reality back into our desires to create the photographic masterpiece. Without the light, it's impossible to create it.

Enjoy your Nikons!

 

[Mike D90]

Those look great. I assume they were shot at a much lower ISO? The D90 just may now be able to handle high ISO

That is what I was trying to figure out as well.

I will check for EXIF data on the flowers. I have these shots posted on the forum elsewhere but I do not have them on my computer anymore. It was certainly a lower ISO as this was shot in bright natural sunlight during the early noon time.

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? I don't see a problem here. They look crisp. Though I can't enlarge them

I noticed that also. I copied these flower images from another post I made. I don't have them on my computer anymore as they were just test images. They were sharp in their original form though.

Try ISO manual at a lower setting. Can the D90 do this? Also, I think you are making settings that are not needed. I would keep the shutter a touch higher and be prepared for wasted shots. You're right birds are flighty. That's what they do.

What I know about the D90 is I can set minimum ISO and it will keep that unless it is forced to go to higher ISO to preserve aperture or shutter speed.

The 3D tracking and the high ISO is your problem. Open your aperture all the way up, bring down that ISO, and go to a single point focus.

If these are very active birds then go to continuous focus.

That is what I normally do or I use Auto Area autofocus setting. These were the first bird shots I have had the opportunity to shoot with my D90 and I set shutter priority to try to keep it up above 1/250th. With the lens I used the minimum aperture for it is f/5.6 so that drove the ISO high due to late afternoon low light I guess.

 

[hark]

Mike, I still use my D90 and do notice a difference in noise between it and my D600. In the past, my D90 has really been through the paces by shooting as high as ISO 3200 as well as longer shutter speeds such a 5-8 seconds. I don't know if these types of settings create long-term problems with the sensor (possibly resulting in more noise all the time), but please take a look at this thread where I posted a photo taken with my D90 at ISO 200. The 4th post shows before and after noise reduction using Lightroom 4 on a JPEG. If I had shot this as a RAW file, most likely it would be even better although I'm certainly not complaining--the results I achieved were terrific comparing with where I started. Lightroom 4's ability to handle noise and sharpness is much better IMHO than Photoshop Elements 10 which I also use. The noise reduction, sharpening, and clarity sliders in Lightroom 4 are incredible!

Also, the 55-200mm lens is good, but the 70-300mm VR is better. When shooting with a zoom lens, it tends to be weak at both ends of the zoom plus it is weak when used at wide open apertures. Since some of what you shot were at 200mm AND wide open, this is not the strong point of any lens.

 

[Mike D90]

Another try today. Birds are finally showing up at my feeding stations so I was able to get comfortable and close.

I tried a lot of different settings. I used all modes of the auto focus and did not like the center point mode at all. Every time I squeezed the shutter button, half way to focus then down to fire, the focus would move off the bird and went out of focus completely. I found I like auto area, dynamic is ok and 3D tracking worked ok too sometimes. 3D tracking did not work well on rapid shots though.

I changed the sharpening and saturation. I used aperture priority and shutter priority. I set my ISO minimum to 800 ISO.

So, I got some better images but still no where near what I want to achieve.

Here are the best of the 108 images I shot. All are from large JPEG as I cannot figure out how to get my NEF files to my computer. I cannot see them on the drive anywhere.

These images are cropped, levels and sharpening adjusted and unsharp mask applied.

 

[Marcel]

Could you post an original file with one of these. I'm curious to know how much they are cropped.

If the focus changes when you depress the shutter, then maybe it's because you are in "AF-C" focusing mode, try AF-S so that after focus you can reframe a bit and the focus won't change. My recommandation would be 1 point focus, AF-S.

I for one can see an improvement on these compared with the ones you posted before. Pratice makes perfect, don't forget that and don't give up. Your D90 is capable of giving you splendid images once you figure out how to tame it to your taste.