David's Images of the Day Photoblog
I was out in the backyard trying to get images of the birds wintering in New Jersey. I noticed a shadow, turned around and caught this turkey vulture flying past the moon.
I saw this flock of Turkey Vultures warming themselves in the early morning sun. The local Turkey Vulture population has increased over the past several years. I think their major food source is deer killed by automobiles.
Soaring Turkey Vulture. This week Thom Hogan has been publishing reviews of Nikon “Exotic” lenses. By Exotic, he is referring to the big telephoto lenses: 200 mm f/2, 300 mm f/2.8, 400 mm f/2.8, 500 mm f/4, and 600 mm f/4. In the reviews, he really likes the 400 mm f/2.8. I have an earlier version of the 400 mm f/2.8 D II (before VR or VR II). I decided to take it out this afternoon. Rather than showing some more images of the local deer, I’ll share an image of a soaring turkey vulture. The image was taken hand-held (yes this is a heavy lens (4620 g, nearly 10 lbs) — and even heavier when you add-on the camera body). The image is cropped significantly as the vulture was soaring well above the house.
If the sky stays clear tonight, I will try some full moon images with this lens (alone and with the TC-E III 20 teleconverter), and some star-trails looking for Perseid meteor trails.
I often use Focus Magic to sharpen images. I prefer using this program since it uses a deconvolution algorithm to sharpen the image, rather than unsharp mask (USM). Here is an example where I used Focus Magic to remove motion blur. On the down side, Focus Magic has not been updated for some time and only runs as a 32-bit application. I can only use it as a plugin in Photoshop CS5 when running the 32-bit version of CS5. For this example I am using an image of a Turkey Vulture in flight (from four-years ago). I tried to improve the sharpness of the head, eye, and beak. The 2nd and 3rd image are 1:1 zooms of the head — first without removing the motion blur, and the second with the motion blur removed (350°, 9 pixels). The results are not perfect, but better than the original image. One of the reasons I do not delete images — new software can sometimes be used to recover and image that previously would have been rejected.
Turkey Vulture soaring. The Turkey Vultures population has increased significantly since the state quit picking up the road killed deer. This is both hunting and rutting season so we have many deer running across roads and being hit by automobiles. Robin feasting on fall “bittersweet” berries. I don’t know if this robin plans to winter, or is feasting before flying south. Finally, some fall mushrooms.