Goldfinch at takeoff poor!!

Tried to take a photo of this Goldfinch but it seems to far off! Taken at 300mm, f5.6, ISO 800 and 1/4000. What could I do to make the image better? or on the other hand what have I done right !!

The first thing that strikes me is the colour, it does look strange if the bird is a goldfinch as they have no blue in the plumage. Could be the camera is producing a blue tint on the images.

Have you cropped this very hard, is it a tiny part of a larger shot?

You were quick on the trigger and if only the bird had flown the other way it may well have been an excellent shot. Think you will need to get closer and use a quicker shutter speed, it is noisy but that may be because it is at 800 iso. Would try to again a bit nearer in good light, change the aperture in order to get a faster shutter speed.

You should have seen the first shots of birds I tried to take they were terrible but you do get better quickly and I started with much worse attempts.

Thanks for that Snapper. Not really sure what I am doing at the moment. This is the original so it was not cropped that much but lightened a good bit.

Ah! right, now that one is not blue so something you did changed the colour of the first one. And to be honest it looks a bit better before you tried to improve it. Could be you went a bit too far in trying to improve it, I will have a go and see if I can suggest anything but I think you need to continue clicking away and see if you can get yourself a nice clean shot.

Sadly you can tweak a shot to improve it but if you try to do too much it is rarely successful although to some extent it depends on what you are trying to do and how good the shot is in the first place.

Anyway I will have a go with your shot and if I can do anything I will let you know what to try.



Not very good and still very noisy but if you want to know what I have done then ask and I'll tell you.

If you would rather I had not done this and reloaded tell me and I will remove it for you and say I am sorry.

Absolutely not Snapper! The whole point of uploading the shot was for people like you to show me where I am going wrong! Your improvement has at least not detracted from the true colour of the bird. I would be grateful if you could let me know what you done. I see that it is very noisy what causes that? I have tried taking photos this evening with a different aperture but they seem too light. I think with all these manual settings I have lost the plot and could do with re setting the lot!!
Cheers!!

Noise is usually caused by high ISO - now 800 is not that high and I would have thought your Canon would have been ok at that setting but in this case not. In most cases outside in daylight 200 ISO is the most you will need except if you are taking moving shots, as in this case, when I would not go higher than 400.

If you can set your camera back to default, I think with most cameras you can, I would do that and shoot on the 'Green' programme for a while and then start trying with setting the aperture for you're self and when you are happy with that try the same thing with the shutter speed and leave the manual focus till last unless for some reason the camera will not auto focus.

What I did to your shot was very rough and ready but I cropped it - increased the exposure a little and then increased the blacks a tad to bring back the colour - increased the size by the % method, let me know if you don't understand that. I then lifted the colour a tiny amount, sharpened a little (which increased the noise) if I have wanted I could have reduced the noise but that would have made the image soft, could have been better perhaps, I should have tried that.

Thank you, you have been very helpful. I shall do as you suggest and forget the manual settings meantime till I can walk a little better!
I have reset the camera settings so that should help.
I took a few shots of the moon this evening before I reset the camera, I won't bore you with those but similar problems are with those as the bird shot so I must be doing something fundamentally wrong..............

Heriedax - if you are happy with people editing your photos then there is a little Edit Icon you can turn on which appears when you post.

Here is the image Snapper produced, passed through a filter:

Thanks Greyhawk, I like it!! I will remember the icon for the future

What did you use Greyhawk? It works well not softened it much at all and if one wished you could easily remove those two litle white marks.