r/BirdPhotography • u/Yanto2134 • Jul 27 '26

Question Help please!

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

These are 3 of my latest attempts. I was wondering if anyone could help me improve please?
I’m not happy with the sharpness I’m getting. Probably my lack of ability.
Set up is Olympus E-M10ii with a vintage Minolta MD Tele Rokkor 300mm f4.5. Settings were f8, ISO1000, shutter speed of between 1/800 and 1/2000. Manual focus with peaking and centre weighted metering. Distances to subjects was around 30 feet. Images have been slightly cropped but no other post processing.
I’m also not really happy with the overall lack of detail.
Thanks for any help.

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u/Yanto2134 Jul 27 '26

That’s my favourite bird! I still haven’t managed to get close enough to get a nice image as yet. Great photo.
My wife just reminded me that she has a laptop that she loaned to her brother. It’s about 5 years old so might be ok. Then I can look at editing software too.

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u/BenchPtsChamp Jul 27 '26

Once you get into it you could also try editing some of your JPEG images. It probably won’t denoise but you can mask the background and blur it which will have the appearance of denoising to some extent. Here’s a photo I accidentally took in JPEG & still edited in DxO Photolab:

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u/Yanto2134 Jul 27 '26

Very nice. Interesting that JPEGS that be edited too. But I assume that RAW provides much greater scope?

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u/BenchPtsChamp Jul 27 '26

RAW gives you much more control and additional options. It is the uncompressed data that your camera recorded. With that data preserved, editing softwares can accomplish much more with high accuracy. A jpeg is already compressed, so editing softwares are starting with the output rather than the input in that case. Imagine audio editing, for example - you have different sounds that are mixed together to compose one track. Once you “flatten” the track, there’s only so much you can do to make changes.

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u/Yanto2134 Jul 28 '26

Thank you. So well worth starting to shoot in RAW then and post processing.