Steller's Jay, Grooming

The jays like to be away from where the humans are...

The Steller’s Jays sometimes come to eat at our feeders. They are not naturally comfortable at a feeder; they tend to stumble because they can’t get a good grip. Most of them give up after a few tries.

This one, however, is a regular visitor, and feeds with confidence. But as soon as I go outside to get his picture, he flies off. For once, he roosted in a nearby red maple and I was able to use the new Sony lens to get a good shot.

This was shot with the Sony A1 and the Sony 300mm f/2.8 (with 2x extender, so actually shot at 600mm and f/5.6).

I tested sharpening on this image; not all lenses produce images which can be carefully sharpened to bring out details. But the 300 + 2x extender behaves like many high-quality lenses do: it’s softness at focus is minor, and well-controlled (it’s not hiding a lot of spurious structure from other aberrations; it’s merely very slightly soft).

So the feather details not he head and wing are real, in the sense that they are at least strongly suggested by the data, rather than made of up of artifacts.

To make my point clear, here’s the image without the sharpening; the feather details are all there, but they are not quite as crisp.