The best way to process your digital photos of birds

You may have caught sight of an earlier post about the beautiful and graceful Short-eared Owls that have arrived on our patch from the far north to over-winter in the slightly warmer climes of the Cambridgeshire Fens. We saw three SEOs hunting in the hour before dusk in mid-January, but I am aware they have been around for several weeks and there are others as well as some Long-eared Owls (LEOs) farther north in Eldernell. Anyway, it’s tough photographing owls at dusk with a big lens, there’s camera shake to take into account and the need for a fast shutter speed to freeze the action, which means high ISO and so noisy photos. My kit, as I’ve discussed before is a Canon 7D mark ii with a Sigma 150-600mm zoom. So not at all high-level equipment and not at all up-to-date to be honest. Anyway, I do my best and got some shots of the SEOs, which you may have seen in the earlier post. I’ve plucked out another nice one to demonstrate my current editing workflow. NB To get the most out of your camera, you should shoot RAW if you can, otherwise the files you get will have been processed and compressed in-camera. So, the first photo below is a simple save from the RAW file straight out of the camera. The original photo was shot at 600mm zoom, 1/3200s shutter speed, f/6.3 aperture and ISO 6400. It’s resized to fit the website, but not cropped and not edited other than to add my logo. The website loads the image as 1024 pixels wide with a JPEG compression of ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Birds Photography Source Type: blogs