Interesting article:
What lens to buy for “birding”…
This page seems to imply around 600mm is often a good choice.
However, my “pixelated images” will still be pixelated when I only go from 300mm to 600mm.
So, what focal length should I consider buying?
Or, should I simply stop shooting flying birds, eliminating that need?
A PhotoLab question - I have PhotoLab on my old MacBook Pro 2015 laptop. What is the proper way to remove it, so DxO no longer has a record of it being on that computer. I will be restoring that laptop back to original condition, and donating it to an eye hospital in India?
I will also be removing older versions of PhotoLab from my two iMac computers one from maybe 2013, and the other from 2017.
I did find this from DxO:
If I just restore the old computer to factory settings, is that all I need to do?
Just a thought - when I’m shooting birds, usually I feel much too “confined”. Everything just happens - unlike when I’m wandering around, waiting for something beautiful to come into view
Using my MacBook Pro, I went back to the early photos from 2022, and found one I never edited before. Just staring at it, I knew what I wanted to do, and it felt like “modeling clay” in my hands. I edited it long ago, but I started all over again, until I got something I liked, finished it up, and posted it here. With birds, a mostly finished scene appears in front of me. With landscapes, I feel like a sculpture shaping things however I wish. With a bird, I want to record what I “saw”. With street scenes, I want to record what I felt, and experienced. Perhaps I’m just wasting my time with bird photography - and obviously I’m not very good at it (yet?). On the other hand, with scenes like this, I make it look the way I felt. Not only that, with scenes like this, I already have all (or most of) the tools I need. Somehow I don’t think a 600mm lens is suddenly turn me into a better bird photographer, at least not by Joanna’s standards.
Does it matter? Of course. With all the feedback I get here, I ought to be able to do reasonably well, as soon as I get used to them. At least I think so - but over my life, doing anything well takes a lot of time and struggle. Ain’t nuthin’ easy!
Photos like this one have LIFE. My bird photos are frozen snapshots in time, viewed through a pixelization machine. Sigh.
MM2_2169 | 2022-08-11.nef (30.9 MB)
MM2_2169 | 2022-08-11.nef.dop (14.3 KB)
Let’s limit this question to what longer focal length lens might be appropriate for me to buy.
The current lens at the top of my list is this:
I have a friend who has one, but who has replaced it with a longer lens.
So, to not get pixilation comments here, what might be an appropriate lens, or should I just give up on even finding a newer/better/longer lens?
I suppose I could just stop taking photos of flying birds completely.
Or, follow the advice posted here, to not even try to capture long distance photos.
Maybe I should consider that at some point, I might eventually switch to a ML camera.
Maybe I should pay more attention to @Stenis and @JoJu, and stop investing any more time and money into what might be a dead-end street for me? Spending another $1K for more glass might just be a waste of money, as I’ll likely never catch up with what @Joanna makes look so easy. The other side of my internal argument is that I’m already 80, retired, and perhaps I should just buy the lens anyway, and see if I can improve my long distance bird photos. I’m just thinking out loud here, trying to express my thoughts, and my doubts.
Having re-re-re read the post by @OxiDant a week ago, and looking at his photos, I can relate to every photo he posted, and instantly see my own desire to use that nasty word “crop”. I’ve cropped for decades, when I didn’t have a long enough lens. The magazines never once complained. But someplace in the back of my brain, I accept everything @Joanna wrote, and find myself looking for a solution.
…not that this has anything to do with DxO PhotoLab.
People can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear!
Cropping should be done in the camera, not the editor!!
Hey, I was all set to buy it but “Leica possesses two of three of these rare lenses ever made, and before you ask, no, they are not available for purchase, highlighting their exceptional status in the realm of photographic equipment.”
Thank you! I needed that!!! I wonder if they make a tele extender? 
I was with my son and a friend of him to this event
Viva italia is a cars event where normal people and well lets say people with money can drive on a F1 race track with there own car.
So fiat 500 abarth’s and big fat Lamborghiny’s, Ferari’s , classic’s, new.
Aslong as it’s a italian car you can show it.
Great moment to charge the battery’s and walk alday around. Trying all kinds of images and techniques.
Shot’s of parked cars, trying to use panning on the straight of the finishline.
Shooting to a peakhole in the fence to catch a cornering car.
Getting a shutterspeed witch freezes the car sortoff crispsharp but have hazy wheels so it looks moving. Some video. For sounds and motion.
Used a 12-60mmf2.8-4 efl: 24-120mm, a 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 efl: 28-280mm and a 100-300mm f4-5.6 ii efl 200-600mm and a 35-100mm f2.8 efl:70-200mm
On the straight standing on the roof of the garageboxes the 35-100mm was great for highshutterspeed images with low iso. A fixed aperture and full zoomrange without forced aperture change is great.
12-60mm was great for parked cars and moving around the parkinglot where people where driving standing parking walking.
14-140mm my first lens as grab and go. Very light and small, surpricingly sharp for it’s pricetag. (non weather resistance and i am not kean on buying the fase III which is optical the same lens but WR.
If panasonic builds a 20-220mm f3.5-5.6 leica ai maybe i swap aldoh a small compact lens as the 14-140mm is is very good at walking and shooting with out sticking out the crowed. iQ wise great lens the leica 50-200mm f2.8-4 is big and heavy and expensive. Still desireable lens. Once i hope i can get one for a reasonable cheep pricetag.
Panning technique, fun to do but difficult to find the sweetspot.
-Big enough DoF to get the car sharp front to back but stil enough isolation for bokeh around the car to enhance the feel of speed.
-Fast enough shutterspeed to have no motion blur of the car but have blurry wheels and ground.
Angle of view on parked cars. Also interesting to practise.
Only problem was the weather, sometimes too cloudy and some rain.
I had much fun. Sadly back to homework of real estate rebuilding.
List of things to do (wishes of improvement) is growing harder then i can finish.
I would love to see some of your captures!!! Sounds like a lot of fun, but potentially very expensive. Probably no insurance for “incidents”.
I used to photograph sports car races a lifetime ago, but that was “real” racing. Back then, I had an MGA. I made an 8mm video of the racing not sure where it is, or how I could digitize it like I did decades ago… Thanks for sharing!!
Maybe you can put up an album somewhere that we can access?
Not necessarily. If you get as close as you can to the water, then stand still, they start to believe you are a tall rock and will approach much closer.
Here is a full frame screenshot of a photo I took back in 2005, with my D100 (6Mpx) camera.
And here is the same image with the PL zoom at 200%…
But, if I use Topaz Photo AI to double the image size then, at 100% zoom and add a bit of sharpening, I get this…
Even standing, if you keep still, they will start to ignore you.
Well, this shot was taken at 280mm.
Since you can’t approach flying birds that easily, thus forcing you to crop heavily, my experience is that you will never find a lens long enough, because you are not bothering to fill the frame or ignoring subjects that can’t fill it.
Now, you can see from my example of a static bird that, with a 6Mpx camera, I was able to get an acceptable image, but only because I filled the frame when I took it.
Your shots of flying birds (and some static birds) sometimes only contain around 2Mpx of actual subject, which is way too small, even if it is only for web viewing. You would need to enlarge them to, at least, 6Mpx to get anything like the kind of detail I got. But, even then, if the pixels are larger than the details, you will not get any worthwhile improvement.
As I have said many times before, exchange your 24-120 and 70-300 for a 28-300 and a 20mm. If you need 24mm, simply zoom in with your feet and/or lightly crop.
Even a “long enough” lens will provide other challenges. Finding the bird and keeping it in frame with one open eye to follow and one watching the OVF are only two of them. It takes a lifelong experience to get better than “randomly in focus and subbject sort of proper composed” shots.
And as I said many times before the 28-300 is a shard with the only advantage of covering a wide range. But as it goes, more advanced lenses than this 14 years old suuuupazoooom are only available on mirrorless (speaking of Nikon Nikkor Z 28-400mm F4-8 VR ) So, the downside of Count Mycula avoiding mirrorless like vampires avoid garlic comes into play.
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(nice emojis here… 
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But the upside is, your D780 won’t show the obvious flaws less prominent and you can buy plenty of tools like @Joanna’s Topaz “pump-up-da-pixls”. 
Absolutely. And I have the handicap of my right eye being very poor so, even in portrait orientation, I don’t have that second eye to keep track with outside of the viewfinder.
But I have the Nikkor 80-400 F mount lens for twenty years and it works wonderfully. Just a bit heavier than I would like.
Well, I had been using Genuine Fractals long before Topaz, to help with my D100 files, and then they brought out the combined package with sharpening, but I prefer PL’s denoising.
Perhaps Mike would benefit from being able to resize his ultra-crops but, from my experience, for his 2Mpx crops, even Topaz is struggling, simply not enough pixels to get beyond the vague blob stage.
@mikemyers it’s not just a matter of focal length. That will just give you the false impression that subjects even further away can be cropped down to 2Mpx without detail.
80-400: 1570 grams, right?
The new Z lens has 725 grams. And still covers a wider range 
A Z 14-30/4: 485 grams.
Coverage from 14-400 mm: 1210 grams. Still lighter than your F-suggestions, but beware of garlicish concepts 
Based on my (limited) experience, not true; they might ignore me, but only after they have moved far enough away from me so they feel “safe”.
What you wrote sounds good, but please try it. Since birds mover erratically, I would never try to fill the frame with bird, or I’d risk cutting off part of the bird as I attempted to keep it centered in the frame. Maybe after doing this for 100 years, I would develop better skills, but that requires LOTS of practice, which I’m never going to get if I ignore these opportunities as you suggest… Think of them as practice. Better yet, try it yourself.
Gack!!! I find myself agreeing with you, although for me, it is only one eye. Just like following radio control race cars. After years of practice, it gets easier.
While that may be true for some people, from my point of view, my 2mp crop will double in size, shooting the same images I currently try to shoot.
The result might not be “good”, but it very likely will be "good enough", as with this image that while you see pixels, other people see what I want them to see, and appreciate, and I speculate most photographers can’t even do this good. All this practice following microscopic looking birds is helping me learn how to follow them while holding the camera steady. If I ignore these opportunities, as I think you suggest, I won’t be getting this kind of practice. What needs improvement is both the photographer (me) and the camera gear.
I dunno. I think the key word in what you wrote is “detail”. How much “detail” is necessary?
The “photojournalist” in me is screaming at me that the “detail” is irrelevant; it is the picture itself that counts, not the detail. Obviously, more detail is better, but that is secondary to capturing the image as best I can. There are many forms for photography. Many of them just involve “capturing the moment”.
For a bird? Enough to be able to distinguish it has feathers and that it is not just a plastic model of a bird stuck on a wall. There is no “moment” in this image, neither is there any “life”.
Just for the heck of it, I selected your least favorite tool, DxO ClearView Plus, at the default setting of 50, and I used a control point to brighten the eye. I also lightened the image, so the colors show up better, even against that awful sky.
Maybe I need new glasses, or a new brain. I love the end result, which you feel I ought not to have bothered to capture. As to “moment” and “life”, can you post a link to an image of a flying bird that displays either “moment” or “life”? It was flying overhead, somewhat low, staring at my brother and me as we were watching it.
I also suspect that the same shot, taken at 500 mm with the Nikon lens I think I should buy, might have had enough pixels to satisfy even you.
All things considered, I’m wondering what other people in this forum think about this image, especially including @wolfgang. If I were to use your Topaz technique, I expect it would be even better. I did the best I knew how, but I’m still in kindergarten at this kind of photo. My biggest problem, pixels, will be helped with a longer lens, right?
Joanna, I do understand what you’re telling me, and from your point of view as a wonderful photographer, I’m in no position to argue. This photo is obviously not up to your standards.
I went to my favorite bird forum, and posted the image, asking for feedback:
I’m very curious as to how they will respond. Nobody has done so yet, and I don’t know what to expect.
I’ll probably buy the longer lens anyway, or I’ll give up on that kind of photography. I’m not sure what to do, and not sure if I’m even good enough to do what you suggest. I’m just curious enough (or stupid enough) to try new things that I don’t fully understand. I could easily see myself going to Wakodahatchee Wetlands once a week, and of course I can easily walk out to my balcony and shoot at Biscayne Bay, and Miami, but I’m anxious to learn new things.
Or, I could always display my ignorance by taking more “abstract images”. Yikes!!!
Very cute!
Can watch with or without garlic:
I’m puzzled by something. I see your photo, and what you did to get the most out of it, but the thing I find most annoying, the shadow over the top of the bird’s head, including the eye is annoying to me. Why did you not lighten the parts of the bird that look annoyingly (to me) dark? I don’t like the lower left corner of the image for the same reason.
Did the original image include more of the waves in the water made by the duck? I wish this image had more of them, along with more “breathing room” beyond the duck, which I know would have made the duck smaller, but you almost always include “breathing room” nowadays.
Also, the issue that bothers you most about my image is the pixelization. I captured 20 or so images, and even though I don’t like the image as much, I worked on one of the images where the bird was closest to me, right before it flew behind a tree.
Perhaps you will consider this version as at least an improvement?
780_4936 | 2024-04-27.nef (30.0 MB)
780_4936 | 2024-04-27.nef.dop (13.9 KB)
I see see any shadow on the top of the bird’s head or around its eye. I see naturally darker coloured feathers in those areas.
What can I say? Everything about my life has always been a “compromise”.
There is that saying, “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link”.
My chain:
Current status:
I still think PhotoLab is the very best.
As to me… hmm, hard to answer, but at 80, I’m certainly going downhill.
My camera - I thought D780 meant buying the very best, but perhaps I ought to have purchased a D850.
My lens - if I keep doing what I want to do now, I need a longer lens. I may have found one, after a lot of searching.
Attitude - I’m far too stubborn, I want to be able to do what all of you seem to do so easily! …and maybe I should do less typing, and more reading/listening.
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