john michael white
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Dont be afraid to aggressively sharpen your images, worst case scenario you post one here and ask if it looks over sharpened.. Depending on the images useage, you can get away with alot, turning soft and even slightly OOF images into keepers..
btw like the 2nd images.
Thanks John – guess I was too afraid of over sharpening ;D
Thanks Brett – well said.
John – I deleted all the grainy bad images, so don’t have anything to send you at this time. I did go back and do a little more sharpening to see what I could get away with. Here are the results: I also added a picture not shown previously.
Not shown previously above:
Didn’t show this one either – kind of like it if I hadn’t of cut off the front goose’s butt:
Previously shown but sharpened a bit more:
John – I’ll have to check when I get home, but I think I deleted most all of the images I didn’t like that were grainy.
The last couple of images you posted appear to me to have flash – is this correct?
Thanks guys. Lots of good info. I probably should have packed it up with the conditions, but I got myself up early, and thought I would shoot anyway and see what I came up with. Hoped the light would come out while I was there but was denied.
John – I’ll try to send you an image tonight when I get home. Thanks for being willing to take a look. The best one would probably be the shot above of the goose that fills the frame.
Jay and John – Gorgeous pics y’all posted.
I’m using a 40D.
I actually started out that morning shooting some frames at ISO 1000, but they just came back so grainy, and when I tried to do noise reduction, I just didn’t like it because I lost detail. For me, it seems that with my camera, anything below ISO 400 is fine, but much above that it seems to get real grainy. I say that with a caveat, in that in some situations, I have shot at ISO 1000 and the images cleaned up very well, but in real low light situations, it just seems to be too grainy. I check all my work at 100%, and yes they do look a little soft for my tastes at that size. I am using Picture Cooler for my noise reduction software.
I should have kept some of the images I shot at ISO 1000 so I could show you and see what you thought. I shot a weird looking duck that was on land and surrounded by vegetation at ISO 1000, and that image I think, would have cleaned up pretty well. But the images of ducks on the water at a distance in this very grey monotone setting were incredibly grainy. When I tried working with them, I didn’t like the result. Seems to be hit or miss for me at ISO 1000, so I kind of default to trying to keep my [EDIT: ISO] as low as possible. This was my mistake though in that I thought that the 1/250 – 1/400 SS was adequate, when really I should have been striving for a much higher SS as you suggested.
I could have bumped up the ISO to say 400 or 600, and maybe that would have given me a good compromise and the SS I needed….there was still room to bump up ISO to gain SS. Good point.
Love those example pics you posted 🙂
Also keep in mind motion blur, birds are rarely *still*. The longer your focal length, the more SS you need to eliminate motion blur. Basically the closer to you a subject is, the harder it is to capture it when its in motion, b) the more SS you need to *freeze* it all else being equal.
I think you hit the nail on the head above – in retrospect, this is something that I was wondering/suspecting the more I thought about things. Shutter speeds may have been fine to handhold on a stationary subject, but these ducks were swimming around pretty fast. These images had shutter speeds from 1/225 to 1/400. f4, ISO 160 to 250. Do you think a monopod would have made the difference at these speeds? Maybe not because the ducks would still be soft due to *their* motion from swimming.
Yes these images were cropped slightly, but I try not to crop very much. A few of them had to be rotated slightly to level the water a bit, and then I had to crop to relevel the image, so lost a little bit there on a couple. I would say that the images that were cropped have a majority (80-90%) of the origional image. I could possibly sharpen more – didn’t want to overdo it.
Thanks for the additional birding tips.
Thanks John – all really helpful info.
Look forward to the shots Kendal.
The next meeting of the Gathering is Tuesday, March 2 at the Alpha & Omega Gallery http://www.photogallerytexas.com/pages/main.htm which is at 507 San Jacinto – just south of 6th Street. Dinner/social starts at 6pm. Usually runs till about 9:30 or so.
Give me a heads up whenever you plan to attend. I look forward to meeting you in person sometime at one of the Gatherings.
