Tufted Duck (female)

[Markus Jais]

EOS 7D, 4/500L + 1.4, tripod, Wimberley Head 2
ISO 800, 1/320, f5.6

Yesterday I was out testing my new EOS 7D. Because I didn't find any Wild Boars as I was hoping, I drove to the Nyphenburger Park in Munich to photograph some ducks.
The light was aweful but I hope the image still works. It was also a good test to see how the 7D works at ISO 800. Not a Nikon D3 of course, but I think it is better than my EOS 40D.
The image was taken at 8fps as I was hoping to get one with an open eye. It attracts the attention of park visitors if you have a camera that sounds like a machine gun :)

This is a little less than a 6 MP crop from the original image. The cropping possibilities with the 7D are fantastic. With the 40D, this would only be about 3 MP.

Markus

[Arthur Morris]

I like the image. Sorry about the missing boars :) There is tons of stuff to learn here. For the respost I selected the BKGR and ran Axel's CS-3 Noise Reduction plus my 1 pixel Gaussian blur. It looks 100 times better. Then, although the eye was open there were some feather's blocking part of it so i did some Eye Doctor work on it. Lastly painted a QM of the bird and applied a contrast mask and got rid of a few white specks on the plumage.

The main thing to learn is that noise can be easily controlled with a bit of study and effort....

Markus: thanks for your comments and ping-backs on the blog.

[Arthur Morris]

ps: Love the patterns in the water. I should have brightened and added a bit of SAT to the repost. BTW, everything that I did is covered in the recent revision of Digital Basics.

[Markus Jais]

ps: Love the patterns in the water. I should have brightened and added a bit of SAT to the repost. BTW, everything that I did is covered in the recent revision of Digital Basics.

Thanks for the repost and the comments. I did learn a lot!!!
Your repost looks a lot better than my original image.


Markus

[Gal Shon]

Arthur have sum it all with his repost.
Repost looks very good.

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Hi Markus

I am always baffled why when having a camera with a huge amount of megapixels people choose to crop excessively. I believe getting close and cropping as little as possible will enhance your image quality. I feel the original post shows the big crop by the amount of visible noise. Perhaps I am incorrect and will happily learn, as I am definitely not a tech head.

Regardless, it is a lovely, well-composed image and Artie has done a great job enhancing it. Well done Markus. :)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the soft light, mood, angle, eye contact and water patterns. The noise reduction made it even better.

[Markus Jais]

@Akos: I agree with you about cropping. I try to avoid it when possible but getting closer was no option. there was very cold water between me and the duck :-)
I normally don't crop below 5 MP. this one is about 6 MP.

Markus

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Markus
The way I understood is that the file is 6mp instead of 18mp? Are you saying it's 12mp since you cropped 6mp from 18mp?

[Markus Jais]

Markus
The way I understood is that the file is 6mp instead of 18mp? Are you saying it's 12mp since you cropped 6mp from 18mp?

The new file is 6MP.

Markus

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

That's way too big a crop from the original size hence why the lack of detail and evident noise, but it has to do if you cannot get closer. :(

[Arthur Morris]

That's way too big a crop from the original size hence why the lack of detail and evident noise, but it has to do if you cannot get closer. :(

It looks pretty good to me. John Shaw once said something like this: "A sharp image from a 4 mp camera blows away 35mm film..."

I say this: digital is amazing. Pop Photo once ran a full page image of a backlit baby crane that was up-rezzed from a 1mb slide show file (because I had lost the RAW and the optimized TIFF...) And it looked just fine.