Ruth at Ruth's Photo Blog asked if I had cropped the photos of the Sandhill Cranes in the last post and the answer is yes, I did crop, although the crops are minimal. They are mostly to focus on the most interesting part of the photo or to bring it just a wee bit closer, not to mention correcting my mistakes while shooting. Bear in mind that the wingspan of the Lesser Sandhill Crane is about 73 inches and when several are flying directly overhead you feel like they are very close! I scramble to get my camera to focus on at least one bird, sometimes with more success than at other times. As you can see, it can also be a challenge to get the complete bird in the frame of the shot. As you watch them fly they seem to be moving slowly but they cover a lot of sky very quickly. I shot the photos using my Canon Rebel XT with my zoom lens set between 225 and 270 mm. The first three photos here were shot in one sequence, and I cropped the first and third photos (Thursday's post photos #4 and #3). I added a little bit of contrast and brightness to the photos too. Refer back to yesterday's post to compare today's straight out of the camera photos to the ones I posted yesterday.
The next two photos were also shot in sequence. I wasn't fast enough to adjust my zoom to get all of the two Cranes in one shot. Poor headless Crane! The second shot (Thursday's post photo #1) I cropped to put the Crane more in the center of the photo instead of having him look like he's trying to fly off the frame.
The next four photos in sequence were from Wednesday's post. The first two were framed pretty well right out of the camera, but I cropped them just a little bit to show more detail.
But then as the Cranes continued to fly I lost my framing a little......
.....and thus over-corrected! Both of these shots got cropped to get rid of the excess of sky.
Of course, these sequences also included a few shots of wing tips, just sky, and out-of-focus birds. Those I can cheerfully discard because of the magic of digital photography. The crop tool continues the magic and can help me correct any errors I may have made in framing while shooting. I always seem to come home from Creamer's Field with several hundred photos even on a rainy day and fortunately there's a delete key on my computer. Don't you just love digital photography?
