Great Crested Grebes

rpsmith79

rpsmith79

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Rich
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After trying out shooting manually with the Peregrines on Friday, i headed over to my local GCG location to try my new found technique, here are the results

As always, comments/critique welcomed, i have tried something a little different composition wise with a couple of them too, so comments on these much appreciated

#1


Great Crested Grebe Chick by Richard Smith, on Flickr

#2


Mother & Daughter by Richard Smith, on Flickr

#3


Great Crested Grebe Chick by Richard Smith, on Flickr

#4


Thirsty Grebe by Richard Smith, on Flickr

#5


Thirsty Grebe by Richard Smith, on Flickr
 
I like these, nice clean images and very nice to see the juvenile ... My fav would be #2 with the two together :)
 
Cheers guys, and yeah i think #2 was my favourite too

I should have said too that these are pretty heavy crops, but i was at full reach with my 300mm f4 and 1.4x TC

Going to try and get back there one evening this week to try and catch them in the evening light, assuming the weather picks up a bit
 
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Nice set, great colour in the water. The pair together wins it for me.
 
They are interesting shots and attractive compositions Rich ……… just hope that they come nearer the next time you visit
 
Bondy said:
Nice set, great colour in the water. The pair together wins it for me.
Click to expand...

Cheers, at first i wasn't keen on the green water, but then thought f**k it and embraced it, i'm glad that it worked out in the end though

BillN_33 said:
They are interesting shots and attractive compositions Rich ……… just hope that they come nearer the next time you visit
Click to expand...

Indeed, and any closer a crop would have showed massively by the lack of fine detail, so thought i'd try to get creative with the composition

I know they won't be to everyone's tastes, but i'm not exactly a conventional wildlife photographer ;) (though i have stopped using vignetting entirely now ;) )
 
Yes, these are very clean and appealing, especially 1-3!

I don't want to hijack the thread (for too long anyway :)) but they are much better than I can seem to manage with exactly the same set-up:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5159779/Hello world_01.JPG

This is a straight RAW conversion and downscale, picture management Neutral, 40 odd percent crop, 1/1250, ISO 220. Any ideas?
 
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guess&press said:
Yes, these are very clean and appealing, especially 1-3!

I don't want to hijack the thread (for too long anyway :)) but they are much better than I can seem to manage with exactly the same set-up:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5159779/Hello world_01.JPG

This is a straight RAW conversion and downscale, picture management Neutral, 40 odd percent crop, 1/1250, ISO 220. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Looks ok to me, plenty sharp enough where it counts from what i can see, what aperture where you using

Mine are only relatively simple RAW conversions, but as i was using a reasonably ISO (400 - 640) as i was shooting wide open

The only other thing i did on mine really was to de-noise the entire image apart from the subjects themselves, so this might have added to the creamy looking water, that and the fact i was shooting only inches above the water level gives an exaggerated depth of field

Oh, and i did mask the Grebes themselves and gave them a boost in contrast and clarity
 
I like the compositions on these, I am pretty much the same boat as most everything seems too far away (my bush craft/stalking skills are rubbish) so end up cropping heavily
 
rpsmith79 said:
Looks ok to me, plenty sharp enough where it counts from what i can see, what aperture where you using
Click to expand...

Sorry, should have said. f/5.6

rpsmith79 said:
The only other thing i did on mine really was to de-noise the entire image apart from the subjects themselves, so this might have added to the creamy looking water, that and the fact i was shooting only inches above the water level gives an exaggerated depth of field

Oh, and i did mask the Grebes themselves and gave them a boost in contrast and clarity
Click to expand...

OK, some good pointers there! I wondered what sort of PP you might have done. I think mine looks, well, tatty somehow. I had fiddled about with it to increase detail via local contrast but this didn't produce as smooth and natural looking a result as yours. I didn't mask anything; I'll fiddle some more.

Could also be user error--I've only just got this and I find it difficult to get sharp shots at less than 1/1000, so I might be restricting the image quality in some way. The Sigma 150-500 with OS was far easier in that regard.
 
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By the way, how are people managing to upload decent quality pictures on here? It said that grebe shot was too big at 541K!
 
I was shooting from a tripod, so didn't need quite so high a shutter speed

As for image quality, I host all my shots on Flickr and link to them, rather than uploading straight to here
 
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