Oak Titmouse Experiment

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

D4 300f/2.8 + TC20EIII (600mm) Manual f/5.6 1/640 ISO 640 (Underexposed by 2 stops) Handheld w/VR
Lifted 2 stops in Raw Conversion in Capture NX2, cropped to 70% of original
Topaz Denoise, Infocus, Adjust, sharpening

Experimenting with underexposure for lower ISO & maintaining somewhat fast ss while counting on the sensor DR and low noise and a little help from pp tools.

What do you think?

Thanks for looking.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[John Chardine]

Hi Michael- You are a brave man- exposing to the LEFT!!!! I see the logic though and it is a neat experiment. I still see some noise in the BG (despite use of Denoise) and even some very subtle horizontal banding, which I didn't think Nikons were prone to. It would be useful to see a nominally exposed image to compare, or even one exposed to the right. Did you attempt the comparison?

[Richard Mc Donald]

Along with your experiment Michael you've also lost some refinements in the shot by going hand held with a focal length of 600mm, pretty good chance you've lost that little bit extra with the x2 TC.

Richard

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Joh, Richard,

Thanks much for the comments. I think I pushed the boundaries a bit too hard on this. Richard, yep, handholding 600mm at 1/640 f/5.6 is a bit of a gamble.

I went back to the drawing board on this... As it turns out it was more than 2 stops, perhaps closer to 3, in processing push. The background didn't hold up. A challenge for very underexposed images is wb, and I went too hot by a fair margin.

John, I rarely do comparisons... my standards for controlled experimentation is too high to actually do such ;-) I generally broadly shoot one way then another and see what I end up liking. On this shot I could have boosted ISO to 3200 or more, but even with the D4 there is a bit of a noise/fine feather detail trade off and I've wondered and am now playing with a low ISO - pp approach... I'll post another experiment shot.

So anyway I pushed and prodded this one a different way:



Custom picture control in NX2 for flat 2 stop push, additional toning in Lab curves. Inreased NR & detailing.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Michael.

Good comment above. The image is soft, contains a bit too much noise and the background distracting. Agree with Richard 600MM HH is risky break out the tripod. Interesting concept but keeping the histogram in balance and spreading data over all 5 stops with normal exposure is what most pros do. But nothing wrong with some OOTB thinking too from time to time - keep em coming Michael - thanks for posting.