HELP!!

Yesterday got the opportunity for some great shots of grebes strutting their stuff in great lighting - I failed and am trying to work out why! Please help.
Canon 40d, 500mm f4, tripod with gimbal head, ISO400, f9 and 1/2000. This is cropped and resized to meet the needs of posting but not much else. I used autofiocus and reloaded CPP to check teh autofocus point and it was on teh base of teh neck of teh left hand bird. I have got sharp shots before but have two different bodies - My suspicions are me or a camera body is "out of calibration". Any advice appreciated.

Cheers

John

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Your shot is very nice, great color and the pose is stunning.

Since there's no way to tell how hard a crop this is I can only start by speculating that distance is the culprit. Your SS looks fine and at f/9 both birds should be relatively sharp given that they are so close to each other. There's plenty of contrast at the focal point so the lens should not be searching. Can you post the unedited shot? This will help validate or eliminate the distance factor. The shot does look relatively sharp and the exposure looks right on.

It's entirely possible that there may be a mechanical problem but I would eliminate distance before I went down that path.

Also, were you shooting burst? Did any of the prior or after frames look identical or was there some change in focus?

A great catch. Hard to tell anything about the photograph. It is way to small.

Nighthound wrote in post #11698919
Your shot is very nice, great color and the pose is stunning.

Since there's no way to tell how hard a crop this is I can only start by speculating that distance is the culprit. Your SS looks fine and at f/9 both birds should be relatively sharp given that they are so close to each other. There's plenty of contrast at the focal point so the lens should not be searching. Can you post the unedited shot? This will help validate or eliminate the distance factor. The shot does look relatively sharp and the exposure looks right on.

It's entirely possible that there may be a mechanical problem but I would eliminate distance before I went down that path.

Also, were you shooting burst? Did any of the prior or after frames look identical or was there some change in focus?

Guys, thanks for the response. I was shooting burst and I have lots of soft shots. How do I post the unedited shot? It was raw and I have never been able to post a link to flicker thus I attach a downsized jpeg.
Thanks again for the help.

John

Here is the unedited Jpeg

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I certainly love the overall feel of the shot. Rich color, interesting reflections, very peaceful

I think the only issue is the distracting reflections in the water.

nc_killie wrote in post #11699979
Here is the unedited Jpeg

That tells us how hard a crop it was but at this scale it's hard to tell how sharp the original is. A larger scaled image will also allow us to tell if the lens/camera combo may be front or back focusing slightly. Sorry to be a pain but if you can size the file again to display at 1024 pixels wide it will help us see things we can't in the small file displayed now.

That was a significant crop BTW and you can expect some loss of quality from the 40D. A FF camera like the 5D for instance would fair much better under the same circumstance.

When enlarging a file in Photoshop it's best to do so with Bicubic interpolation. I use the TLR image resizer found here. Works great.
http://www.thelightsri​ghtstudio.com …ResizerForPhoto​shopCS.htm