Prepare for Takeoff

[Bill Dix]

Yesterday morning at a nearby nest. C&C appreciated.

D7000 | 500f4 + 1.4 TC | ISO 800 | 1/1600s @ f/8 | +0.7 EV | monopod braced inside car door

[stuart wanuck]

Nice posing image good capture

[Wynand van Wyk]

Super take off moment captured! Lovely detail. Well done!:S3:

[Ofer Levy]

Awesome pose, light and colours. I see some noise on the wings and head doesn't look very sharp. No fine detail too - I assume this is a significant crop?

[Bill Dix]

Awesome pose, light and colours. I see some noise on the wings and head doesn't look very sharp. No fine detail too - I assume this is a significant crop?

Thanks Ofer. Yes, I see some noise too. Exposure was spot-on (just a tiny bit to the right), so at 800 with this camera I was surprised, but there it is. Here's a repost with a slight denoise on the wings, and some more sharpening (although the additional sharpening probably reintroduced whatever noise I took out). This was cropped from horizontal, and vertical dimension is about 60% of full height, so it is certainly not destined for printing at gallery size; but I was actually pleased with the detail for such a large crop. I appreciate the comments.

[Herb Houghton]

Nice wing position in the takeoff mode. The repost looks better, less noise in the wings, sharper head.

[Duane Noblick]

I actually prefer the sharpness in the first image. I do like the wing up position. I'm wondering if anything was done to the head feathers as far as buring or are the white feathers a bit dirty.

[Bill Dix]

I actually prefer the sharpness in the first image. I do like the wing up position. I'm wondering if anything was done to the head feathers as far as buring or are the white feathers a bit dirty.

Thanks Duane. I didn't do any burning of the head feathers, but did use a little s/h to knock down the highlights, and slight contrast boost to bring out the texture. The head is not pristine white, as can also be seen in my other images of the bird.

[arash_hazeghi]

dynamic pose and nice exposure, I agree IQ did not come out great, I hope you are using CNX2 to get the best out of Nikon camera.

[Karl Egressy]

Great take off pose captured, Bill.

[Bill Dix]

dynamic pose and nice exposure, I agree IQ did not come out great, I hope you are using CNX2 to get the best out of Nikon camera.

Thank you, Arash. I am not using CNX-2. I sort and weed images with Nikon's View NX-2, convert with Adobe Camera Raw into PS Elements 9 where I process images as TIFF's before final JPEG conversion and sharpening. I can appreciate the logic of using Nikon software for RAW processing, although I've seen reviews claiming that CNX-2 is very slow (I disliked Lightroom for the same reason). Am I really losing much image quality by not doing more of the processing in RAW?

[arash_hazeghi]

Bill, unfortunately third-party software like ACR do not do justice to the NEF files when it comes to noise and fine detail. I highly recommend using CNX2 to get the best out of your Nikon, if you don't have a fast machine (quad core with 8GB RAM and a RAID or SSD drive) it runs a bit slower than ACR, but the quality is worth it IMHO.


Best

[Bill Dix]

Bill, unfortunately third-party software like ACR do not do justice to the NEF files when it comes to noise and fine detail. I highly recommend using CNX2 to get the best out of your Nikon, if you don't have a fast machine (quad core with 8GB RAM and a RAID or SSD drive) it runs a bit slower than ACR, but the quality is worth it IMHO.


Best

Thanks Arash. I've been trying to keep things simple and avoid the learning curve (and cost) of another program, but I guess you get what you pay for (in $$ and time). I'll give it a try. Unfortunately I'm running a dual core processor with 4GB RAM, so I guess I can expect some slowdown.