Brown Pelican diving

I love the diving posture of the bird, especially since it is positioned just above the water. Overall the bird seems a bit soft, shutter speed and light may not have been optimal to really nail the sharpness. But I really like the unique posture

Agree with Greg's comment, diving posture is really very nice and I like a lot the look aiming at water, but image is a little soft. However a pleasant shot.
Giorgio

Moment caught well.Nice moment.
István

Great action shot!

Congrats

D&L

Hilke, the large crop really shows in this image. Not much detail in the feathers and noise showing up in the bill. Some suggestions for shooting this type of action would be to drop the f down to say 5 and get the SS up. From this distance f/5.6 would have provided plenty of DOF for this bird. I strive for at least 1/1000s for this type of action. I am impressed you where able to get the bird this sharp with a SS of 1/250s given the fast action.

Thanks for all your comments. One correction, the SS was 1/1250, not 1/250. So Ron, I am sorry about the error.

I agree with Ron, I'm surprised this is fairly sharp at that shutter speed and with a large crop. It doesn't look like you had a lot of light to work with to make it much faster. That lens is wide open at F6.3 at 500mm so 5.6 wouldn't have been an option but I agree that you could probably shoot this at 7.1 or so and still have enough depth of field since it's cropped a fair bit.

Hilke,

I like the diving pose you captured and that despite the dive you were able to get the eye open and in good view.

I would have used f6.3 for aperture since it appears you could not have gone to f5.6 to gain shutter speed and hoped that the majority of the pelican was within the focal plane as it dove. Since it was a large crop you were probably far enough away from the pelican to achieve that.

Thank you so much for your comments. I sharpened the image a little more using the unsharp mask and selective sharpening of feathers etc, and think it's better.

Your techs make more sense to me now Hilke that I see it was at 1/1250. I haven't used that specific lens but many lenses are sharper stopped down a little bit so I don't think you were too far off in terms of using the right f-stop for this shot, probably about F8.