Stonechat and a lesson

[Olybirder]

I came across this Stonechat at Carlton Marshes last week – the first one I have seen for quite a while. It was moving about a lot so I decided to use Continuous Autofocus and the easiest way to do this was to use my BIF settings. I switched over to them and remembered to change the AF target to Single Small. However I forgot to change the shutter speed which was set to 1/2000 second and the result was that the ISO shot up to 6400. I was trying to get closer to the bird while keeping it in the viewfinder, so I didn't noticed this at the time. As a result the images were extremely noisy, which was disappointing. I cleaned them up the best I could but they would have been so much better if I had used my brain. The lesson is to think and check the settings before pressing the shutter button!



Ron

[Olybirder]

I still haven't mastered posting images here. The first image is 1600 pixels wide and the second, square one is 1200 pixels. When I inserted them I selected 1600 for the first and 1200 for the second. I assumed that the second would display at a narrower width than the first but they both display at the same width. It's all a mystery to me.

Ron

[Ian]

Do you have the Topaz apps?

[Olybirder]

Yes, I have them all. Why?

Ron

[Ian]

My comment may be out of date now but I did think there was some additional potential for improving the IQ.

[Ian]

I still haven't mastered posting images here. The first image is 1600 pixels wide and the second, square one is 1200 pixels. When I inserted them I selected 1600 for the first and 1200 for the second. I assumed that the second would display at a narrower width than the first but they both display at the same width. It's all a mystery to me.

Ron

The first does display wider but your browser needs to be wide enough to show this. An image too wide to be displayed in full will be reduced in size to remain wholly visible.

Ian

[blackfox]

its something we have all fallen foul of Ron ,heres to the good ones that are coming

[antpitta]

I can't see what the problem is with your pictures as posted! If that's at ISO 6400 plus a bit of PP then they look pretty damned good (and maybe better than they might have been at ISO 200/400/800 and significantly slower shutter speeds?). Just my own experiences this year, but having pretty much stuck to ISO 3200 by default and depending on de-noising in DxO PL5 or ON1 I'm preferring the results of higher ISO and faster shutter speeds for bird photos (like Andy Rouse and others ...).

[Olybirder]

Thanks Chris. I have to confess I have reprocessed the images since I originally started this post. This time I opened the raw file in Topaz Photo and used it to remove the noise. I then saved it as a DNG file and developed and processed that with Affinity Photo. That seemed work much better than using Topaz Photo on the JPEG file from Affinity.

I agree with you that it is better to work with higher ISO settings at this time of the year in order to obtain faster shutter speeds but I think ISO 6400 is a step too far. I think I will persevere with CAF as that seemed to work quite well from the focusing point of view. I will have to sit down with the camera and work out some settings which might be suitable for this time of the year.

Ron