Most from the Santa Ana River trail, spider from Irvine Regional Park.

The water in the river is diverted to the far side and there's very little vegetation, so it's hard to get close-ups of waterfowl right now. The dowitcher pictures are from about 200 feet away, and then cropped to 9%. I'm pretty pleased with this zoom lens.

Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II

Western Bluebird

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Yellow Warbler

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Long-Billed Dowitchers + Black-Necked Stilt

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Honeybees in Prickly Pear blossom

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Funnel Weaver spider

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Here’s my analogy. Olympus is the Subaru of cameras. I told someone I drive an Outback, and they said “Ah, an engineer’s car!” Like Subaru, Olympus is not the best seller, but technically leads in several areas: size, weight, image stabilization. It can do everything from macro to astro, focus stacking, etc. Can be challenging to learn all the details because there’s so much built into it.

This is making me rethink my whole post processing workflow. I have been using Adobe Camera Raw for a lot of processing, because I like two of its features, but I now see its initial rendering of Olympus’ RAW files is really noisy. On a new file today, I used Olympus’s OM Workspace (a new version) to do initial edits and they are *much* less noisy… but it’s slow to work in. I then exported 16-bit TIFF to ACR. Wow, what a difference. Maybe that “chromatic aberration” or “out of focus” proble was ACR. Hm…

Well, I spoke too soon. The second image wan't an AF miss, it was image #9 of a burst of shots at 11 fps. The Olympus sequential High mode locks AF on the first shot and doesn't change it between shots. The AF point on the first was right on.

Olympus Workspace (now OM Workspace) has a new Focus Analyzer tool that compares multiple shots in a burst sequence and ranks them according to focus, using a rectangular area one gets to choose. Another feature to play with! The 9 images are all very well focused, but it's amazing how much movement occurs in 8/10 of a second. But any movement toward or away from the camera are insignificant at 204' and f/6.7 (DoF = 27').

So I think that kinda confirms that CA caused the feeling of out-of-focus in the first images. Something I'll watch for next time.

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You are correct! Thanks for pointing it out - I took a look and learned a few things.

#1 was manual focus, #2 was autofocus and the focus point was off in the sky. See the attached pic from OM Workspace which shows the miss. I thought they were both taken the same way, but over the course of 30 shots I switched a few settings. Looking at them close up, though, the AF shot is pretty good for 200 feet away and heavy crop. I think what we see as "out of focus" is purple/green fringing indicating chromatic aberration in *both* shots, which I've never really dealt with before. Adobe Camera Raw says it's applying the lens' built-in CA profile, but apparently it's not doing a great job of it. And ACR has no profile for *any* Olympus lens, so I'll have to dig into this.

I reprocessed the images and this time I used ACR's Super Resolution, which I often do but had not with these. That made it easier to see the fringing and use ACR's manual Defringe tool. It helped a lot, especially with vertical edges. I think I still see some fringing on horizontal edges but it's much less noticeable zoomed in, and the overall images look better. I'm attaching some before-and-after zooms showing talons and bark detail... way better with Super Resolution and defringing. and not much difference now between the AF and MF shots. Also attaching the reprocessed full shots.

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I've never seen Red-Shouldered Hawks before. These two landed in a tree not far from me, unfortunately not quite in full sun. And, well, it is mating season.

Irvine Regional Park, Orange, California, USA

Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II
F6.7 @ 300mm, 204 feet distance, manual focus, 9% crop

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👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

I see them at many parks and rivers here. I think they were imported years ago for private ponds and now they are all over. The “rings” around their eyes make them easy to spot from a long distance.

Thanks.

I've tried twice to put captions on each pic. Not sure why they are not sticking. I give up.

Canada goose. I was intrigued by the concentric color patterns.

Gadwall

Mallard. These are so common here I never cared much for them. But I'm noticing how many ducks have nice fine patterns in their plumage... trying to capture that is my latest challenge.

Egyptian geese
Fox squirrel
Ground squirrel.

Finding a sweet spot of sharpening and noise reduction in post processing helps a lot.

Thanks.

Last weekend at Yorba Park, Anaheim, California, USA
Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II

More exciting mammals would be nice, but squirrels is about all we can find in the suburbs.

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Beautiful!

This tiny starfish climbed the inside of my daughter's aquarium, in front of a cool Green Star Polyp soft coral.

Olympus E-M5 II, 7Artisans 25mm F1.8

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How tall is your post? Higher is better for accurate wind speed.

I got a 7Artisans 25mm f/1.8 as my first prime lens, and I think it’s great. It’s fully manual, so no autofocus, but Olympus’ Focus Peaking works with it and I have had some amazingly details shots with it. The aperture ring is smooth, no stops, so you can set it wherever you like. Quite small, and feels very solid like it’s all metal. I think it was $85 a couple years ago.