Post Production

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26
Jan 09

ISO 3200 works – does it?

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!

lynxes

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.

iso3200_comparison

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:

iso_lynx

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.

fallows

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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Post Production — No Comments
8
Nov 08

Roe Deers instead of Birds, focus stacking tele photos

The guide had already announced that in the apple plantation we would pass through on our walk from the visitor center into the nature reserve, there would be a high likelihood of seeing some Roe Deers. We did see some far away on our way into the area, but only on our way back we also encountered the one he had described as being an “albino deer”, albeit without red eyes.

They were relatively tame, because according to him they “knew the plantation was fenced, and no dogs or humans would leave the path”, and these two actually had no trouble with me getting down low, setting up the tripod and taking some dozen pictures through the mesh wire fence.

roe_deers_front_focus

Now, how did I compose? Well, obviously I placed the albino (well, it is just really light-colored) out of the center to the lower right, and made sure that I had a nice framing using the plants. Once I had it framed I snapped some pictures, being nervous that I do not get it into focus… I still have not yet fine tuned the Sigma 100-300/f4 I am using using the new manual focusing feature of my D300. This proved to be not a problem at all, and the sharpest images are those where I placed the autofocus point on the ear of the deer using the multi-selector control.

Then, another deer passed through the frame, and I snapped some more images with it in different poses, walking, standing, checking. I liked the presented image best because I didn’t have one where the two interacted – and only that would make it successful for me. Now in this one, both interact with the photographer, and thus the viewer.

The next challenge was, that I knew I could not possibly get both into focus. Now at home I can check the DOFmaster, and estimate the range of the closer of the two at probably 20 meters, which results with the selected aperture of f/5 (get a fast shutter speed when doing wildlife! This gave me 1/500s at ISO 400) in a depth of field of only 88 centimeters, clearly not enough. If I had stepped down to f/22 I would have had 4 meters, which could (just) have sufficed, but of course exposed me to the danger of motion blur at about a 1/25s I would have ended up with. I actually did try quickly an f/10 with 1/100s (not knowing in the field that it would also just give me 1.77 m, still not enough), but discarded that as also not being sufficient after a quick check on the display.

So knowing I had insufficient depth of field, I had snapped a second frame very quickly, focusing on the second deer.
roe_deers_back_focus
Now looking at both images, I like the one with the focus on the lower right deer better, but still my eyes keep jumping to the second, and being disappointed that it is not sharp. Obviously I have two competing subjects, and one of them is out of focus, ruining the image.

Solutions? Either take a frame with only the first deer, or next time use the large aperture to get both in focus. Workaround? Fix it in Post Production!

I have used the free program CombineZP in this case. I read about, but did not try, Helicon Focus, which is a commercial software package for the same applications.

roe_deers_focus_stacked

Wow, you say, that worked well. And so easy! Not quite. If you could see the 12 MP version of the image I of course did not upload, you would clearly notice that I did focus on each of the two deers, but as I have only two shots I have none focused on the grass between them. It is not immediately apparent (if at all) in the screen resolution version, but this nic prevents this image from being used at full res. So next time I try this, I should remember to make a nice focus series including the distances between the two subjects. Learned something again ;-)

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