Do this if you want bird photos to really take flight

Recently, I wrote about the beautiful Short-eared Owls that turned up on our patch over-winter in the slightly warmer climes of the Cambridgeshire Fens. I got photos of three hunting in the hour before dusk. The photos were okay, but I knew I could make them better with a few simple tools. The problem is always hand-holding a big lens when the light’s fading. There’s camera shake and a short shutter speed is also needed to freeze the action. This adds up to the camera switching up the sensitivity, the ISO, and that makes for more photographic noise. So, what can you do to improve a noisy photo that might also have a bit of motion blur. First off, you must make sure you’re shooting in RAW mode. RAW mode lets you download what is essentially an unprocessed digital negative of the photo you took. I’ll run you through what I do with the RAW files out of my camera. The original photo was shot at 600mm zoom, 1/3200s shutter speed, f/6.3 aperture and ISO 6400. It’s resized it to fit the website, but not cropped and not edited it other than to add my logo. The website loads the image as 1024 pixels wide with a JPEG compression of about 90%. It’s quite noisy, not as sharp as it could be, the levels (contrast, brightness, saturation etc are not optimised). And, in terms of composition, it’s not how I’d want the final photo to look. First step is to feed the RAW file to DxO’s PureRaw2. This removes some of the noise and applies basi...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Birds Photography Source Type: blogs