Post Your Best Nature Shots!

[Fast Glass]

Very good shot, the wite-balance is to blue andit could use alittle bit more saturation.

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

Nice shot Joel, that 300 f/2.8 is a beauty, the crop is well balanced, exposure is good for my taste. If you want you crop clone out the two out of focus branches and I wish the bird is facing toward you instead of looking away. Good luck next time.


Nate,

[Joel Eade]

Thanks for the comments guys, now that you point it out, it does look too blue. Here's one I took earlier today with the same lens, I agree Nate it really does perform beautifully. I think the shots you've posted are amazing. I'm still on the upslope of the learning curve.[img]/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.00.32.28/IMG_5F00_3466.jpg[/img]

[Fast Glass]

There we go, less blue....[Y]

[George Slusher]

Thanks for the comments guys, now that you point it out, it does look too blue.

A suggestion, Joel: use JPEG + RAW. That way, if you had the wrong white balance setting, you can change it. The EXIF data says it was on Auto White Balance, which was probably fooled by the background. AWB works well in some situations but is terrible in others. A background with a strong, predominant color is one of the "terrible" situations for AWB. The only real drawback for JPEG + RAW for nature photography is the extra storage space, but memory cards are cheap (well, at least, compared to what they USED to cost!). (Most sports photographers don't use RAW because it really slows down the camera, so they can't shoot bursts as quickly.) If the JPEG is good, use it. If it needs tweaking in exposure, tone curve adjustments, white balance, picture style, etc., use the RAW shot.


Here's an example. I don't remember precisely what happened, but I think that I was resetting WB from daylight to shade and inadvertently went one step too far to tungsten. (Evidence for that explanation is that, right after several shots like this, I have more shots of the same flower with shade WB.) The result is "interesting," perhaps, but hardly realistic.








Because I shot JPEG + RAW, I was able to fix it with Canon's Digital Photo Professional. (You an also use Photoshop or Lightroom.) Here's the same photo with Shade WB.











Better, maybe, but it's apparent that Shade wasn't the best choice. I tried Daylight, instead:











Remember that this was all from the same file. (I could probably tweak the white balance a bit more, but it's not worth the time.)

[George Slusher]

I should add a few other points:

• The RAW file is not altered by any of these adjustments. They choose the "recipe" used by the software to convert (render) the RAW file to JPEG. Your camera does the same thing in creating the JPEG, but, like a cake that's baked, once it's made into a JPEG, your options for adjustment are much more limited
• With DPP & Lightroom (edit: and Adobe Bridge for Photoshop), it's easy to apply corrections like this to a group of photos all at once. I'm not sure about Photoshop, as I only use Photoshop Elements, which can process only one RAW image at a time.
• If you're going to be working on the photo in Photoshop or Elements, it's a good idea to choose the TIFF output option in DPP, rather than JPEG, as it preserves all the information. (JPEG uses a "lossy" compression scheme. Every time you change something and recompress the image, you lose quality and increase the likelihood of artifacts.)
• For the same reason, save your Photoshop work as a .psd file, then as a JPEG. That way, if you want to redo something, you can.
  
• You can crop in DPP, as well, which can give better results than cropping the JPEG.
  
• I wouldn't recommend shooting in RAW only because that would add a lot of time to your "workflow." Much (most?) of the time, the JPEG that comes from the camera will be fine.
• The RAW files from my 30D are 6.7-8.2 MB. RAW files from your 40D would be larger, both because the 40D has more pixels than the 30D and it uses 14-bit capture vs 12-bit on the 30D.
• To cut down on storage requirements for your HD, you might keep only the RAW files you need to tweak. (It might be good to backup all the files, including RAW, to DVDs or CDs, in case you want to work with an image later.)

[Joel Eade]

Thanks George for all the handy tips. I usually shoot raw with auto white balance and work with acr/photoshop cs4. I don't shoot a large number of images due to lack of free time away from work during daylight hours so I guess I haven't noticed it slowing me down but I'm sure you're right about that. I'll try the raw + jpeg option to see how it works. I typically save my finals as jpegs to an external drive and burn my raw files to dvd. I'll definitely try your ideas about tiff and psd files. Thanks again.

[Oren]

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Wow! Joel, I have many times said how great Nate's pictures were and that no one here comes close to him. I can now tell you that with this picture, you are on par with Nate (image quality wise). That's what I think at least [Y][H]

[btaylor]

Both great shots Joel - that's a wicked lens. Maybe I'll look into robbing a bank...

[Joel Eade]

Thanks Oren &amp; btaylor, the lens does have fantastic sharpness. I don't think my shots have great light and interesting backgrounds like Nate....mostly because they are shot in my backyard which is surrounded by tall trees that filter out the morning and evening sun and also cause a diffuse green background in summer or diffuse grey in winter. But I like trying to get detailed portrait type shots of the birds from close range. The biggest challenge is to get a fast enough shutter speed to get a really sharp image.