Another glory Sunday morning – where I managed to get out of my bed and got – yes! – got out there!
This day I chose the Wildlife Refuge in Poing close to Munich as my destination, because the weather report on at least one channel had announced the chance for fresh snow – and I am still dreaming of making some images of Lynxes and Wolves while it’s snowing. Why “still”? That story is kept for another day…
Arriving at the parking lot at exactly 9am – which is when they officially open the park to visitors on weekends – I was of course the only visitor at this time. So here is my tip for everybody wanting to go there in order to take photos: Go there early. Leave when the children invade, usually two hours later.
So this morning I was the only nature photographer on site, which was a first for me, normally you meet other photogs. Guess I was the only one who left without checking the weather report again – no sign of new snow, much to the contrary at 11am the sun came out and it got really “warm”.
But before that happened, I had a quiet happy two hours alone with the Lynx family – they have actually seven Lynxes of different ages there, all one big (mostly) happy familiy, and the three “teenagers” are usually good for some fun. Now, it was not only cold in this forest, but the Lynx enclosure is also in a pretty shady and thus dark corner of the park. As the sun still hid behind clouds, exposure was actually at about 1/40s at f/4 with ISO 400. Good enough with the lens on the tripod to shoot a sitting Lynx. Or three of them!
So I could actually try out another new gear of mine – a folding chair that cost me 7€. Well spend money, because I could sit comfortably (not in the stricter sense of the word) next to the fence (get close to shoot through the wire mesh!) and monitor the action. And action it was, indeed – after some 20 minutes of mutual fur grooming the three youngsters decided that was enough idyll and it was time to hunt – fir cones.
Trying to capture that, I quickly recognized that I would get nowhere with my ISO 400 1/40s exposure time, and it was the moment to go the full nine meters and give the D300 a try at ISO 3200. Did it work? Kind of.
First of all, the exposure time went down to 1/1000s at f/4 and ISO 3200. So far so good, quick enough to catch a Lynx. And looking at the images in the Nikon View NX application I use for presorting and pretagging, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail and color retained in the ISO 3200 images.
Disaster struck when I opened the RAW in Adobe Camera Raw to load it into Photoshop for post production – image noise everywhere, and to an extend I had last seen from my D70 at ISO 1600. I had thought the D300 to outperform the D70 easily, even despite the smaller pixels. It does, but seemingly only in terms of noise reduction software algorithms.
Now I struggled and tried all available noise reduction methods easily discoverable in Photoshop, but I still don’t like the result. Quality is certainly good enough after resizing the image down to Web/Monitor viewing friendly dimensions, but thoughts about printing need to be dismissed immediately. This might explain why Noise Ninja and Neat Image still make money. My conclusion: Photoshop – at least CS3 – doesn’t solve the problem. The additional tools might, and definitely the Nikon software does. I should review my assessment of Nikon Capture NX. Such a pity, I still own a license to Capture 4.4, but that is discontinued and doesn’t support the D300′s files.
But judge for yourself if the image is usable at Web resolution, this is the best I could do with CS3 alone:
As a bonus, when I already were packing my things I could spot two male fallow deers – please be gentle with me if I got this wrong – practicing with each other. I was able to sneak in on them on get a shot from close between two trees, which makes the whole composition look, well, interesting. I kind of like it.
Needless to say the moment their heads merged they were not within my viewing window. That would have been perfect, but as usual – keep trying.
On my way out at about 11:15am I met three Canon photogs with their big white guns having just arrived, and couldn’t help but cheer them a friendly “Guten Morgen” when they were coming in together with approx 100 Bugaboos 
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