It was tough to get a good shot of this Pileated Woodpecker. Backlit with a dull gray sky and pretty high up in the tree made conditions difficult. I ended up taking over 175 shots to get the two I posted here. After try a low shutter speed (320/sec) to reduce noise I said the heck with noise and tried some at 1000th/sec. I decided the noise on the higher shutter speed was not that much worse than the others so I’m going to experiment with higher shutter speeds in these conditions in the future.
Pileated Woodpecker
Country United States
State Illinois
Location Morton Arboretum, Lisle
Gender Male
Age Adult
Activity Nesting
- Created Timestamp01/05/2020 10:16:32
- CameraCanon EOS 7D Mark II
- Aperture5.6
- Focal Length400
- Iso1000
- Shutter Speed1/320
I feel your pain about shooting woodpeckers. Often they are backlit and their head movements are very fast and unpredictable. With the 7D2 I shoot at 1600 ISO often. There will be some noise in the bird’s black feathers but the bright sky typically has little to none. Often I will run an aggressive noise reduction on the whole picture in PS; then I will go back with the “history brush” and erase the noise reduction on the bird. In a black bird like this I will set the history brush at 70-80% on the black area while erasing 100%… Read more »
Great shot, Mike.
That’s a great picture