BIF: Turkey Vulture

[Mr. 2H2O]

I had posted a Bald Eagle and explained about a lake being drained. After the Herons and Eagles grab the live fish, the vultures claim the dead ones. We had lots of Turkey and Black Vultures scrounging around. Here's one just after takeoff.

- Mike

[Shasoc]

Very nice capture, and good perspective.:thumb

[Harryb]

Good BIF :thumb

[ShepsMom]

Good capture, but i'm wondering about the colors. How much did you have to crop? I always have a hard time get all the details on these guys, but i don't want to distort the image by croping too much. :dunno

[Mr. 2H2O]

Good capture, but i'm wondering about the colors. How much did you have to crop? I always have a hard time get all the details on these guys, but i don't want to distort the image by croping too much. :dunno

Marina,
I took this shot on 5MP mode in my Panasonic camera - that gave me an effective focal length of 600mm - it crops the center portion of the 10.1MP sensor but gives a 5MP image. I just cropped the image for centering the bird so the final crop is really almost 1/2 of the image. The final image is 2MP. I posted it at 600x800 resolution.

I did some saturation adjustment and USM plus some contrast adjustment to compensate for the smaller dynamic range of my sensor.

I believe the real measure of the crop is the size of print you want to make. Optically, the further back the viewer's eyes are, the less detail is necessary. For instance, you can hang a lower resolution 8x10 higher up on the display wall and the lack of detail will go unnoticed. I am currently waiting for a 16x20in print to come back from an image I made cropping down to 1.5MP - I don't expect it to look great but if it is hung high enough on the wall in the office building, it should appear okay to the viewer. I recommended against it but they moved forward with the print.

- Mike

[ShepsMom]

Got ya!! Thank you for the explanation! :D