Winter Bird Photography

It's dark, it's cold, but the birds are still here.

I needed to test one of my lenses that I use for bird photography, the Sony 200-600 zoom. (I had just updated the firmware, wanted to make sure it was OK.)

I needed something that was moving to test the updated features, so I set up on a tripod on the front porch to shoot some flowers swaying in the breeze.

This is Seattle, so it was cold, snow flurries were coming and going, and it was dark—perfect terrible conditions to really make the lens work hard.

And then a hummingbird settled in the tree at the edge of the porch, protected by the eave. I wasn’t expecting much, but I took a very dark shot and hoped I would at least be able to test whether the focusing was working correctly.

This was the image I got.

It sort of looks focused, but it was really dark due to the conditions. A dark, under-lit scene is the hardest test of focusing, however, so I brightened the image only to find it was really noisy (which is what happens when you get a dark image at ISO 3200).

It’s not a terrible image, and the focusing is clearly good. But I thought it would be fun to use some of the noise clean-up tools I have to see if the image could really be restored to something cleaner.

So I ran the image through Topaz DeNoise software, and finished it up in Photoshop. I was really impressed by the result.

Not only did I get better focusing with the firmware upgrade, I learned that I can do ‘extreme’ bird photography now. Crazy, how good today’s software and hardware are!