chasing the focus

The setting: Photographing horses
The gear: EOS 7D with a 70-200 f4L
The target: A hawk hovering above my head
The problem: Hawk is way further and somewhat smaller than a bunch of horses doing steeplechase. 200 mm isn’t nearly enough for photographing a hawk in flight – not even with a converter, which was safely tucked in my gearbag. Big help it was there, and should I have started digging it out of there the hawk would’ve been long gone before I would’ve been ready. So I had to make do with what I had.

This was the result:

Not really impressing, huh? Ok, so I wasn’t even expecting anything strikingly good with the gear I had. Just a decent photo that showed a beautiful hawk at flight. After some cropping, levels tuning etc. this was what I came up with:

Well, at least it shows the focus is where it should be and you can see it’s a hawk and some detail too. But it’s still not pretty and also it’s very boring. So I fiddled again and came up with something I actually kind of like. But still, next time I want to have that 700 mm f2.8 tube that only weighs about 200 grams!

So, here’s my compromise:

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