Tree Swallow

Originally uploaded by Laura Meyers

The picture of this adorable Tree Swallow was taken at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge Sunday April 11. I had a big breakthrough with my Canon EOS 7D camera this weekend. I have owned this camera for about four months and have been really frustrated trying to get better pictures than I did with the Canon EOS40D that I owned before. I am very motivated because I love having the 18MP size on the Canon EOS7D because I can crop way down in order to get in close on a small bird such as this.
When I first started with the Canon EOS7D, I pretty much used it as I did the Canon 40D not wanting to spend the time learning the new autofocus system, etc. Reading the CanonEOS7D manual was not very helpful. I purchased the Charlotte Lowrie book which was one of the first to come out and was not inspired. I got a little more information from the Magic Lantern Guide for the Canon EOS7D but I remained frustrated at the noisy soft pictures i was getting.
Additional I was scouring the web and nothing struck me.
I purchased the Arthur Morris guide and a small thing he said about how the sharpening is really soft in the RAW format (and can be made more sharp in the menu) made me review my sharpening options. I was using the clarity function in lightroom and the smart sharpen option in Photoshop CS3 and getting really lousy results.
I set upon checking out what other options I could do – like unsharp mask, etc. What worked for me was using the sharpening option in Lightroom – especially the detail slider. I bypassed clarity entirely. I feel like I have overcome a big hurdle and am no longer ready to through the Canon EOS7D out the window. And I can continue my learning curve with some clarity as to where to go next.