What’s Up?
On Monday, we put Clemens Van der Werf’s flats boat in at Coleman Landing at Shady Oaks, just 20 minutes from my home. The highlight of the morning occurred early on when a male Snail Kite landed very close to us right down sun angle with a large snail and then extracted the meat. Photos soon. After brunch, we shared and worked on lots of images. After a rib-eye/salad pool-deck dinner I hit the sack early.
Lot of folks commented on yesterday’s Osprey with Black Crappie: Cool Light/Warm Light. And Hand Holding a 600mm f/4 Lens … blog post — I will be sharing my thoughts on that post here tomorrow.
Today is Tuesday 4 May 2021. We are headed to Lake Blue Cypress for more Osprey photography. The forecast is for partly cloudy with south winds, pretty good for bird photography. Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, I hope that you have a great day.
This blog post took less than an hour to prepare and makes 131 consecutive days with a new one. Please remember that if an item — a Delkin flash card, or a tripod head, for example, that is available from B&H and/or Bedfords and is also available in the BAA Online Store, it would be great if you opt to purchase from us. We will match any price. Please remember also to use my B&H affiliate links or to save 3% at Bedfords by using the BIRDSASART discount code at checkout. Doing either often earns you free guides and/or discounts. And doing so always earns my great appreciation.
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Grab a Nikon AF-S Teleconverter TC-14E III and save $14.99. Purchase a Canon EOS R5 and your discount will be $116.97. Purchase a Sony FE 600mm f/4 GM OSS lens and save a remarkable $389.94! Your Bedford’s purchase no longer needs to be greater than $1,000.00 for you to receive a discount. The more you spend, the more you save.
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Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending BAA IPTs (remember those?) and dozens of photographers whom I see in the field and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail
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This image was created on 3 May 2021 near Coleman Landing at Shady Oaks from Clemens Van der Werf’s flats boat. I used the hand held ??? lens and The One, the Sony Alpha 1 Mirrorless digital camera. ISO 1250. Exposure determined via Zebras with ISO on the rear dial: 1/800 sec. at f/???? in Manual mode. AWB at 7:53am with some heavy cloud cover on the eastern horizon. Wide/AF-C was active at the moment of exposure and performed perfectly. Click on the image to see a larger version. Image #1: this is a representation of the raw file for the Boat-tailed Grackle feeding young image |
Aperture/Depth-of-Field Multiple Choice Question
There is a much too much background detail in the original image above. Scroll down to see the optimized image.
What aperture was used for the image above?
a:f/4
b: f/6.3
Please let us know why you made your choice.
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This image was created on 3 May 2021 near Coleman Landing at Shady Oaks from Clemens Van der Werf’s flats boat. I used the hand held ??? lens and The One, the Sony Alpha 1 Mirrorless digital camera. ISO 1250. Exposure determined via Zebras with ISO on the rear dial: 1/800 sec. at f/???? in Manual mode. AWB at 7:53am with some heavy cloud cover on the eastern horizon. Wide/AF-C was active at the moment of exposure and performed perfectly. Click on the image to see a larger version. Image #1A: the optimized version of the Boat-tailed Grackle feeding young image |
Turn-around is Fair Play
Probably a decade ago, I taught Clemens to use Viveza. Over the years, it disappeared from my workflow. On Tuesday afternoon, Clemens kindly gave me a refresher course on using Viveza II. I will not soon forget Viveza …
After converting the image in Camera Raw, I executed my crop and then ran Topaz Denoise on Auto. Then I used Viveza to magically soften up the background in today’s featured image and to reduce the brightness and saturation as well. Be sure to compare the optimized version (Image #1A) with the original (Image #1) to see what I was thinking and what I did in Photoshop.
Typos
With all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors.
Well, it could have been the heavy as a ton 600mm at f4 depending how close you where to the birds….can’t tell. Please don’t let us hanging. So either the 200-600 at 6.3 the widest it goes or the 600 with a crane helping you hand hold it at f4. It was kind of dark, iso 1250 and only 800 of a second in a rocking boat with dark clouds so I lean toward a ton of a lens…too heavy for me, myself and I.
Bp
Sony 200-600mm lens @ f/6.3
Brilliant! Or not?
with love, a
While it is an excellent documentation of bird behavior, I don’t care for the photo as “art,” mainly because both birds have their backs to the camera and I don’t find that aesthetically pleasing.
From where I sit, the perfect head angle of the bird on our left makes up for a lot of that …
with love, artie
Without knowing the distance from the subject and background and FL, it is really somewhat of a guess. I think the time and description suggest lower light levels and at an ISO of 1250 I’ll take a stab at f/4, 600mm. I suspect the bush or bank was reasonably close to the subject.
Thanks, Adam. FL is noted above as 600mm (unless I am still drunk on wine).
with love, artie
Hi Art. I have a question regarding cropped images and Topaz. I crop a raw image in Canon DPP4 and save it. When I open it in Topaz Denoise or Sharpen the uncropped image appears. Even though it was saved cropped. What am I doing wrong? Thanking you in advance.
I think f/6.3. Because the branch in front of the birds is in focus. giving a deeper dof.
Not sure in DPP 4 as it has been years since I used it. Do your crop in Photoshop and make sure to check the box for Delete Cropped Pixels 🙂
with love, artie
I will try cropping in photoshop. thanks.
Another option in Photoshop is to flatten the layers after cropping.
If you flatten the layers are cropping but have not checked the Delete Cropped Pixels box then all the pixels will be there when you bring the image into Topaz.
with love, a
I’m assuming the first picture was f6.3. I never keep images with those kinds of backgrounds so I would appreciate learning about Viveza II or anything else that would get rid of all that contrast.
Beauty! I have used Viveza as well and find reducing the contrast and structure improves the backgrounds of particularly noisy images, but more often than not I find I use luminosity masks on virtually every image in process now. I use the TK7 Action Panels. I think you would love them 🙂