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Nikon Wednesday 2017: #10


Matt Laur

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Important: please keep your image under 1000 pixels on the longest side for in-line viewing, and please keep the FILE SIZE UNDER 300kb. Note that this includes photos hosted off-site (at Flickr, Photobucket, your own site, etc). Are you new to this thread? The general guidelines for these Wednesday threads are right here:http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00W7km. This forum's moderators are allowing up to three images per week, so share some work!

Continuing to haunt the local construction crew as they frame up the project they're working on. They're on the roof, now, so they had a crane in yesterday to get the materials up where they belonged. Mostly shooting video of this project, but here are some stills, out of the ol' Nikon rig. Share some photos on this fine Nikon Wednesday!

 

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Two weeks ago I said goodbye to my loyal and gentle friend, the golden retriever T-Bone. He lived to an advanced age (for his breed) of nearly fourteen years. He was my most patient and handsome model, and thanks to him I developed the taste for photographing dogs. I will post three photos of him. The first one was taken when he was in his prime, at six years of age. The camera was Nikon D90, the lens Nikon 70-200 mm.

 

20100701_8055.jpg.a16ef9c1aebfd5240304d2750c6a8eb0.jpg

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And this one was taken less a month ago, when he spent most of his time sleeping near my bed. RIP, friend. T-Bone 03.16.2003-02.22.2017.

Camera: D7100

 

[ATTACH]1178607[/ATTACH]

 

Remember that your friend isn't gone - all that he was, remains in your heart and memory. You can revisit him any time you want. His tale is fully known now. It's a great story, a book you will re-read many times.

 

I wish you peace, when the grief has passed.

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tsypkin: I'm sorry for your loss; thank you for sharing T-Bone with us. I had a golden retriever in my youth; your post, like some of Patrick's, remind me to capture more memories of my current little old (and badly spoilt) cat.<br />

<br />

In T-Bone's honour, we seem to have a canine theme, so I'll roll with it. Here are my promised coyotes from my Yellowstone trip at the start of the year. (I was hoping for wolves, but only got as far as, ironically, prints; maybe next time.) All these are cropped; maybe I should hire an 800mm next time.<br />

<br />

This guy was lining up to dive in the (Madison, I think) river after a duck. He narrowly missed, and sadly I wasn't quite quick enough to get the attack itself. He didn't look happy at getting wet unnecessarily. (One of his friends was fishing with a similar lack of success, but far enough away that my images are a bit limited.)<br />

D810@ISO1000(+0.4),1/800s;200-500+TC14E2@700mm f/10<br />

DSC_4118_DxO.thumb.jpg.bc330c0ef44e351b88549de00040e395.jpg <br />

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This guy seemed to be following a trail - although whether of other coyotes or whether he was after subnivian food I'm not sure. He had a good sniff of a lump of snow just after this.<br />

D810@ISO560(+1.1),1/500s;200-500+TC14E2@700mm,f/10<br />

DSC_4282_DxO.thumb.jpg.0c41d9a145d6658f16707cc0d1b9a4c6.jpg <br />

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Finally, our coach got given a long and suspicious look before this guy wandered off. Possibly to ask what I was expecting to achieve through dirty windows...<br />

D810@ISO560(+0.9),1/500s;200-500@700mm,f/10<br />

DSC_4305_DxO.thumb.jpg.1b127678ac8c926d249a16a25d8ae03f.jpg

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Nikon D810, AF-S 300/4E PF VR, 1/640s, f/4.5, ISO360. Fantastic lens for this type of shooting, it's light and small.

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Quite a bit more futuristic looking. Wonder why the Police isn't riding Harleys :cool:

33132234271_27cac89099_b.jpgfuturistic

Another first world problem: I am beginning to miss the vertical grip on my D810 when shooting in portrait mode but don't want to (a) spend the money and (b) carry the weight. What a conundrum:rolleyes:

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I know this is no words, but I have to ask... my images on these threads always seem to appear a bit soft, even though they look okay on my screen. Am I paranoid? (I appreciate that, despite being at f/10, I don't have all that much depth of field in the above images.) Is everyone else applying quite aggressive sharpening? I do end up cropping quite a lot, which I'm sure isn't helping the source material. Boosting the dynamic range would have helped a bit (I was paranoid about blowing whites; I'll know to trust the histogram more now it's had a snow test) but I've been thinking my images look comparatively soft for a while.
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I've been thinking my images look comparatively soft

They do look soft to me, as have a few that you've posted before.

Is everyone else applying quite aggressive sharpening?

I wouldn't call my sharpening aggressive but I do have a PS action that I run after I scaled down the image for posting on websites. I do not, in general, apply any sharpening to the original-size image (leaving the option open to sharpen later specifically for whatever output device or output size might be required). I do boost micro-contrast most of the time though, sometimes maybe a bit too much.<br.<br>Maybe open another thread to discuss this and possible play around with a few images (preferably original-size)?

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They do look soft to me, as have a few that you've posted before.

 

Well, good that I'm not imagining it, bad that I'm posting soft images. :-)

 

Maybe open another thread to discuss this and possible play around with a few images (preferably original-size)?

 

I'll do so; thanks. I'm usually either posting a 100% crop (which won't be softened digitally but will be limited by the optics) or relying on default downsampling, usually from DxO; I often try to crop to an integer scale factor, to help the downsampling quality. Clearly whatever I'm doing isn't working!

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Well, good that I'm not imagining it, bad that I'm posting soft images. :)

 

 

 

I'll do so; thanks. I'm usually either posting a 100% crop (which won't be softened digitally but will be limited by the optics) or relying on default downsampling, usually from DxO; I often try to crop to an integer scale factor, to help the downsampling quality. Clearly whatever I'm doing isn't working!

 

Perhaps show us the original? The more you crop, the worse an image becomes. The D8xx series cameras will really highlight any lens or technique deficiencies too.

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Thanks, Patrick. I'm sure a 200-500+TC14 through a window in a snowstorm on a moving subject don't help on these ones. I'll have a play with an image which I have more reason to believe should be sharp over in the beginner forum (where it should be more helpful, perhaps?), and post a link here for anyone kind enough to advise me. I'll have a play when I get home and have more access to my images.
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Is everyone else applying quite aggressive sharpening? I do end up cropping quite a lot, which I'm sure isn't helping the source material.

 

I never shoot through windows, I use fast shutter speeds (for my above images they were shot at 1/1600s), I rarely use a TC, I don't crop much (maximum about 2x, this usually is because I need to leave some room for the action around the edges, sometimes also because I'm not quick enough to zoom tightly); usually the cropping that I apply to images to improve framing in post-processing is between 1x and 1.3x. I apply sharpening after resizing the image to display size (PS CC Smart Sharpen 70% / 0.7 / 10% for online images).

 

In the case of my skiing images, the last one is better than the other two because of brighter light and more lighting contrast and colour contrast. In this kind of action situation the focus may be a bit less precisely correct than usual because the action is quite fast. So I stopped down to f/4 as it was practical to do so instead of my usual living dangerously wide open.

 

I would not post an image cropped to actual pixels. I think those individual pixels are best kept a very small part of the final image, instead of openly displayed. :)

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On the matter of sharpening, I don't apply much, but usually put in a little unsharp mask on the final, downsized JPG. I usually use either View NX2 to make the initial raw to JPG conversion, especially if there's any cropping, or Faststone Image Viewer if its less critical, and use Faststone for the sharpening at the end. Here's one straight from View NX2 with no sharpening.800356304_weatherfront.thumb.JPG.cbe308db5a30dd89405bce5fdce88d8a.JPG

 

D7100, 35/2.8 PC

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Remember that your friend isn't gone - all that he was, remains in your heart and memory. You can revisit him any time you want. His tale is fully known now. It's a great story, a book you will re-read many times.

 

I wish you peace, when the grief has passed.

Thank you very much. I do have a lot of joyful memories of T-Bone. We were very lucky with him - very well behaved with rather minimal training, but lots of love and attention from his human family. He was practically never without one of us, and the last year either my wife or I were always with him. And I have photographs to look at. I got my first DSLR primarily because of T-Bone, when I discovered that the compact digital cameras were terrible at capturing a young dog, always moving. I remember, I think, that you lost your golden retriever a year or two ago...

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