Pre Dawn Pileated

[jfenton]

I've never even had the honor of seeing one of these in the wild but this morning my luck changed! I was tracking two green herons flying in just before sunrise and all of a sudden...one of them wasn't green!

The light was extremely low so I bumped the ISO to 640, turned the in camera NR on to normal and grabbed 6 shots....two of which had decent focus. I'm not unhappy considering that this was at 1/100.

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[Gale]

Wow Jim

He is a great catch... Good job :>))

Looks great

 

[daodang]

Great catch Jim. Very well exposed too.

 

[Keith]

they do look prehistoric. LOL..........great catch Jim!!

Keith

 

[dmwphoto]

Very nice! I would love to get a few shots of these.

 

[Russ Smith]

Jim

Great images of a bird that doesn't like to be approached.

I am fortunate that I have nesting pairs on my property that use 100 foot dead pines to hollow out their nest. I see them frequently but only for a few seconds. In fact I had the rare occasion to see 5 at one time.

Russ

 

[bobhoge]

Hi Jim,

Really nice photos! This one is a male because of the small red stripe on the cheek.

Like you, Nan & I had never seen one until on the way home from Merritt Island Shoot I in February. We saw one when we stopped at Sebastian Inlet Park on the way back south. They were very skittish and hard to shoot.

Bob & Nan

 

[eng45ine]

Very nice captures, Jim. The red feather on the head and the texture on the trees is outstanding.

 

[PhotoDawg]

Well done Jim!!

 

[Gordon Large]

I'm not unhappy considering that this was at 1/100.

Hey Jim -

Not unhappy??? These are wonderful captures. I would be ecstatic to get shots like these under any conditions.

Gordon

 

[Bob Coutant]

I envy you. I spent much of the winter months trying to get any kind of shot of the ones in my woods.

Well done!

 

[hillrg]

Hi Jim

Darn good shooting under the conditions. Those photos look really good for ISO 640 - did you do any noise reduction, or just the in camera NR?

 

[Blind Observer]

Nice shots Jim, indeed those guys are hard to find I came across one once but by the time I approached it was gone.

 

[jfenton]

Hi Everyone

Thanks for all of the thoughtful and nice comments! Capturing a shot of a pileated has been extremely high on my most wanted list and this absolutely made my day...although, I got some more special stuff which I'll have to process later on!

I did turn the in cameras NR to NORMAL prior to taking the shots as I intentionally dropped the EV a bit in order to up the shutter speed. The sun hadn't actually come up yet and even at ISO 640, I had to shoot at 1/100.

In NC...I cut the NR in half of what NC wanted to apply so as not to loose too much detail.

 

[Pa]

Beautiful pictures. We have one of these that has been frequently visiting us and sitting on the windowsill and peeking in at us. I've tried several times to get his (her?) picture, but the bird is very shy and spooks at the first sign of movement indoors.

This has been going on for two years!

 

[jfenton]

Rory

I did indeed turn the in camera NR to NORMAL in the split second I had before taking these shots. Actually, I've now made a custom bank for this.

In NC...I turned all sharpening to none (in both the Advanced Raw menu and the USM) and I cut the NR by 50% over what capture wanted to do.

I did my sharpening in PSCS.