We moved from Arizona where I had easy access to the Salt River horses about a year ago. Since then, I've been struggling to get decent pictures of the Yakama Indian
Reservation horses. Unlike the Salt River horses, they are extremely wary and in additon, access is pretty much limited to what you can see from highway 97 between Yakima and Goldendale. The horses seem to be even more afraid of a stopped car than they do an individual. Consequently, my husband drops me off and then drives down the road.
I managed to get a few shots yesterday that I'm happy with and wanted to share them with you.

We moved from Arizona where I had easy access to the Salt River horses about a year ago. Since then, I've been struggling to get decent pictures of the Yakama Indian
Reservation horses. Unlike the Salt River horses, they are extremely wary and in additon, access is pretty much limited to what you can see from highway 97 between Yakima and Goldendale. The horses seem to be even more afraid of a stopped car than they do an individual. Consequently, my husband drops me off and then drives down the road.
I managed to get a few shots yesterday that I'm happy with and wanted to share them with you.

Hi,

Your photos are very nice and I love to see horses "running free" and obviously thriving.

But.... I really hope you don't mind, I have a concern and wanted to give you some feedback, which I intend to be constructive.

All four of your images appear somewhat "soft". I looked at the EXIF and see that you shot them all with a Canon 100-400L IS USM "II" on a Canon 80D. I use that lens too (though in my case it's usually on one of my two Canon 7D II cameras). I know from experience that it's an extremely sharp lens.... far sharper than it appears in your images, especially considering you're using it on a higher resolution camera than mine.

Some of your shutter speeds were a little slow (1/320), but the IS of the lens is quite good and should have compensated for that. Other shutter speeds are a lot higher.... I recall at least one of your images was 1/1000, which should have been fine. You could probably bump your ISO up from the 200 you used for all these shots... likely would see little or no difference with ISO 400 or even 800.... maybe even higher. Canon encourages using a bit faster shutter speeds ever since the original 18MP 7D, noting that the higher density sensors were more susceptible to camera movement. However, in this case I doubt it's a solution to the overall image softness. I don't really think that's due to "camera shake".

It also doesn't appear to be "missed focus".... That usually causes only part of the image to be soft, which isn't the case here.

This suggests to me possibly a problem with the lens itself or a poor quality "protection" filter on it or something else. Another possibility would be if the camera were set to a lower quality "small, coarse" JPEG setting to conserve memory card space. I've even seen a dirty image sensor cause some images softness, though usually that's more subtle than it appears in your images.

Here are some examples of images I've shot with my 100-400 II, for sake of comparison. Note that I have not done Micro Focus Adjustment with this particular lens. It didn't seem to need any tweaking. Most of these images are watermarked and fairly small, but I hope will be adequate for you to see what I mean (to keep infringement to a minimum, I keep most images I display online to 700 or 800 pixels at most, on their long side).

The last two images below are a test shots I did that are enlargeable... the first is the lens alone (400mm, f/9), while the second was using a Canon 1.4X II teleconverter with the lens (450mm, f/11). I did these test shots to compare the lens performance with and without the teleconverter. FYI: I mostly shoot RAW and post-process via Lightroom and Photoshop. When I do shoot JPEGs, I only use Large/Fine. All these images are fairly "straight from the camera" RAW conversions... no sharpening applied other than the default in Lightroom.

I hope you find this helpful, as it's intended. Your images are lovely as they are, the softer appearance seems a bit "dreamy" and might even be what you intended (and I think people tend to over emphasize sharpness). But, if that wasn't a "look" you were going for, might indicate a problem.

400mm, f/5.6, ISO 3200, 1/8000...


400mm, f/7.1, ISO 1250, 1/2000...


A high speed series shot at 142mm, f/6.3, ISO 640, 1/3200...

We moved from Arizona where I had easy access to the Salt River horses about a year ago. Since then, I've been struggling to get decent pictures of the Yakama Indian
Reservation horses. Unlike the Salt River horses, they are extremely wary and in additon, access is pretty much limited to what you can see from highway 97 between Yakima and Goldendale. The horses seem to be even more afraid of a stopped car than they do an individual. Consequently, my husband drops me off and then drives down the road.
I managed to get a few shots yesterday that I'm happy with and wanted to share them with you.