Guys/gals help me out on the focus in this image....granted I was dealing with thermals/atmospherics and somewhat sizeable crop.
I see feather detail on the chest AND the branch behind the hawk is apparently in focus but the face is soft????
Think more MFA (or whatever Nikon calls it) is needed?
Regardless I was ecstatic to find this hawk the evening before nesting in a cliff face in Chaco Canyon New Mexico. Found him the next day via two super
helpful Ravens dive bombing him down in a wash.
Western Red-tailed Hawk Dark Morph.
I get this quite a lot. In my case it always seems to be due to the bird moving its head and the shutter speed being not quite fast enough. You'd think that 1/2500 would be enough to freeze everything though. Then again, I often find myself thinking that maybe my teleconverter needs higher shutter speeds because it magnifies tiny movements that I wouldn't notice without it. Birds heads seem hardly ever to be still, the problem being worst with the small ones.
The other possibility is that it's just a DoF issue. You're probably already way ahead of me here, but I find that the closer I am to a bird with my 100-400, or the closer a TC appears to get me, the narrower the DoF becomes. Here the bird's streaked upper breast seems softer than the barred belly and that might be because the breast and head are nearer the lens. It could be an MFA issue, but where was your point of focus?
Just a couple of thoughts from someone who doesn't really know anything much.
