{"id":32701,"date":"2015-07-12T05:08:13","date_gmt":"2015-07-12T11:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=32701"},"modified":"2015-07-12T05:14:43","modified_gmt":"2015-07-12T11:14:43","slug":"blurry-wing-tips-is-it-shutter-speed-or-depth-of-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/12\/blurry-wing-tips-is-it-shutter-speed-or-depth-of-field\/","title":{"rendered":"Blurry Wing Tips – Is It Shutter Speed Or Depth Of Field?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bird photographers like to know why<\/em> certain elements of their images are soft (blurry) when others are not because it helps them to evaluate their\u00a0settings and technique.\u00a0It’s usually an issue of either insufficient depth of field or shutter speed but telling which one is the culprit\u00a0can be difficult, especially since the effects of\u00a0the two can\u00a0meld together.<\/p>\n

The following image is not my best flight shot of a Burrowing Owl but due to a\u00a0camera\u00a0setting mistake\u00a0I made it\u00a0allows us some pointers about determining the source of the softness when it’s in the wingtips of a bird in flight.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 1600, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, canvas added for composition,\u00a0not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The first thing I notice when I look at this image is that the head and body of the owl are sharp but the wingtips are not and I immediately wonder why. It could be either depth of field or insufficient\u00a0shutter speed (motion blur).\u00a0The image was taken\u00a0couple of weeks ago\u00a0very soon after\u00a0dawn (6:37 AM)\u00a0and the light was becoming more intense by the second so when this owl took off I had much more shutter speed than I needed (I shoot in aperture priority), largely because my ISO setting was too high for the conditions at the moment.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0this unusually fast shutter speed would even have frozen the wings of a hummingbird so I know that it’s a depth of field issue, since the head is sharp. I can rule out shutter speed.<\/p>\n

At this focal length I have relatively little depth of field. When I use this depth of field calculator<\/a> for my gear, settings\u00a0and at the distance I was from the bird I find that my “acceptable” total\u00a0depth of field is barely more than 9″ and that explains why these wingtips are soft because I had less than 5″\u00a0in front of and behind the head that would be acceptably sharp. These owls have very long wing spans even when they’re not fully extended.<\/p>\n

Shooting at a significantly lower ISO and perhaps at\u00a0 f\/7,1 or f\/8 would have given me more depth of field so the wingtips would have been sharper and I’d have had the additional benefit of better image quality because high ISO’s introduce\u00a0noise or grain into the image.<\/p>\n

I’ve covered this subject before but one of the ways we all learn is by repetition so I thought it deserved another go. Sorry for the photo-geekiness of this post – back to our regular programming tomorrow…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: soft wingtips\u00a0of a bird in flight, whatever the reason for them,\u00a0are not necessarily an image killer.\u00a0Wing motion\u00a0blur can be perfectly acceptable as long as the head and body of the bird are sharp. Like so many things it’s often\u00a0a matter of taste.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bird photographers like to know why certain elements of their images are soft (blurry) when others are not because it helps them to evaluate their settings and technique.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,365],"tags":[24,34,510,62,105,1481,146,692,2325,187,222,959,278,282],"class_list":["post-32701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","tag-adult","tag-aperture-priority","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-depth-of-field","tag-depth-of-field-calculator","tag-flight","tag-focal-length","tag-grain","tag-iso","tag-motion-blur","tag-noise","tag-sharpness","tag-shutter-speed"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/burrowing-owl-3766-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-8vr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}