Grizzly Cubs

[Ross Konigsburg]

Nikkor 300mm 2.8
Nikon D800e
ISO 3200
1/320 at f3.2
Hand Held

[Jason Hurst]

Cute capture! They look like two little kids heading home to Mama knowing that they're in big trouble...the way they have their heads hanging down. LOL.

[Jon Rista]

Cute little fuzz balls! I like the low angle here, and the foreground blur. The background seems a little distracting...perhaps some touch-up work to make it a bit less "noisy" would help bring out your two wonderful subjects a bit more.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Ross, a cute image indeed, well composed. The low POV really makes this shot, especially having the river in the FG and the pebble shore line for these young bears to run along.


perhaps some touch-up work to make it a bit less "noisy" would help

Jon are your referring to Noise Reduction?

I do think the image does suffer a lot with noise which is surrising with Nikon, even at this size, but perhaps some NR applied would help. Might have gone to 2.8 only to give a bit more SS, not sure how much DOF you have gained with 3.2?

TFS
Steve

[Jon Rista]

@Steve: Good question...I should have been clearer (I guess quotes weren't enough of an indicator.) Not referring to noise reduction. I think the image is great from a pixel noise standpoint...unless your doing serious cropping, pretty much any camera these days does well in terms of noise.

By "noisy", I mean there is more detail in the background than there probably could be. A little spot healing, patching, cloning in Photoshop to mitigate the detail in the background so it is not distracting. Perhaps a little bit more blur to soften the detail that ends up remaining. Particularly around that brown batch of grass or roots or whatever it is to the middle right of the background, just in front of the bears. For some reason my eyes are drawn to that as much as to the bears. If it was an indistinct brown blur, rather than a brown blur with structure, I don't think it would be much of a problem at all.

I'm honestly not sure f/2.8 would have helped. It is only 1/3rd of a stop, so it probably wouldn't have done much...I figure there was a fair amount of cropping to get such a nice tight frame around two bear cubs with a 300mm lens/ ;) I think the background can definitely be improved in post, though, so the aperture used really doesn't matter all that much.