Sunday, August 26, 2018

Heron, Great Blue (I think)

I know nothing about bird identification.  Aside from being able to identify a common house fly and a mature robin, I would fail miserably on Jeopardy if I had to identify other critters in the flying category.  OK, I got the Eagle thing right but even a blind flying squirrel blah, blah, blah.
I can make make an educated guess at this one, with the help of Wikipedia and the Refuge site.  The most common Heron in the Refuge is the Great Blue.  I'm also assuming this isn't a Crane or Egret.  (Photos of those later.)
Fortunately, through my photo club we have some birders - and I can get some real help.
So for now I'm going with this is a Great Blue Heron.


ISO 400, f/8, 1/250 sec, 440 mm

The day was very cloudy, flat light.  Last weekend I was playing with higher ISOs and I wanted to keep today's at 400 to see any differences.  I should have swapped the days, but the focus is pretty good here.  Love that VR image stabilization.
One of the other things I was playing with was the Image Size setting, going from DX to 1.3x.  Essentially some of the crop(ed) sensor is reduced even more creating the ability to stretch the MMs a bit more.  I can go from 450mm to 600mm.  But there should be a penalty for that - and I found it.  The image you see is pretty much the image you get.  It is small.  On the D7200, the DX (RAW) image size is 6000 x 4000.  In the 1.3 mode, the (RAW) image size is 4800 x 3200.  So you get more of an effective angle with the FX lens.  The math hurts my head.  In the end, I tried to crop more of the image and it just didn't work.  Anything over 100% started to pixelate.  Well, if I wanted professional photos, I'd have to dole out more $$$$s.  But I'll take this one as it is.

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