here<\/a>). I belong to the Gold Membership level which costs me $100\/year and that C-note\u00a0was the best money I’ve ever spent.\u00a0You qualify based on the Canon gear you have and I suspect that many of my readers could qualify easily. I actually qualify for the Platinum Membership level but in my situation I don’t see the need to do so. I’d highly recommend CPS to serious photographers who qualify (and no, that is not a paid endorsement). I know that Nikon has a similar program but I’m relatively unfamiliar with it.<\/p>\nThere’s only one caveat. I don’t know yet if my lens issue is fixed or if one even\u00a0existed in the first place. In their “service details” that came with the repaired lens they say that “the product performed according to specifications” but they also\u00a0say that “adjustments were carried out on the autofocus assembly”. I’ll be calling CPS soon in hopes of talking to the technician so I can get additional feedback. I do have some questions but I was able to very briefly take some test shots last night\u00a0just before dusk and at this point those results look promising.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"western](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/western-grebe-1704-not-rotated-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’m very\u00a0tired of\u00a0moderately soft\u00a0shots. This Western Grebe image\u00a0illustrates the kind of sharpness I’m used to – even when viewed at 100% both birds are almost sharp enough to cut my eyeballs. It’s relatively easy for a slightly soft image to look good at the size I use on the web (900 pixels on the long side) but at larger sizes, especially for printing,\u00a0any softness becomes glaring. I’ve recently licensed this image to a highly respected publisher to be printed at 3\/4 page for a new bird book they’re coming out with this summer. If the birds in the photo\u00a0had been even slightly soft\u00a0the image would never have been sold.<\/p>\n
I hope my lens issues are behind me but it’ll likely take me a few days to know for sure. We’re in the midst of an awful winter inversion so shooting conditions aren’t the best.<\/p>\n
I apologize to many of my readers for this post.\u00a0Some have no real interest in photo-geek stuff but others are\u00a0serious photographers who may have\u00a0considered joining CPS for some time so I thought\u00a0this information might be useful.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My 500mm lens was returned from the shop yesterday afternoon, even earlier than I dared hope.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33748,"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":[338,6,334,366],"tags":[738,2801,2850,481,2843,2384,2849,322],"class_list":["post-37343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-western-grebes","tag-back-brooding","tag-canon-ef-500mm-f4l-is-ii-usm","tag-canon-professional-services-review","tag-chick","tag-cps","tag-lens-repair","tag-soft-images","tag-western-grebe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/western-grebe-1704-not-rotated-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-9Ij","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37343","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=37343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}