Kingfishers - My First Shots Of Them

lammie

lammie

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First time I have had a chance to take pics of kingfishers since I took up bird photography 2 years ago. Hope you like them.Comments always welcome.

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great captures, the only thing letting them down is the noise. I know getting shots of kingfishers is hard and these are better than anything i could do so well done !
 
:clap: Come on then - tell us a bit about these shots - range, lens, ISO, from a hide?
 
CT - File info for these shots. 300mm f4lens + 1.4 ext making exposure F5.6. First two taken at ISO 320 third ISO200.
Taken from hide, hand held. Cloud covering sun which was behind the bird. Bird was about 3.5 metre away. Cropped slightly and a bit of sharpening.
 
Nice distance! - I'm not jealous at all! :baby:

You need a longer lens mate! :D

Generally speaking, the converters don't do your shots any favours, but I have the same problems and often have to use them when I'd rather not.
 
Thanks for your comments Dave & CT. I've only had this lens about 6 weeks and I am only just learning with it and I couldn't use my tripod as there was someone else with all his gear in front of me so I had to be content with looking over his shoulder to take these. I can't afford one of these big lenses so I'll just have to get a bike and cycle closer to the subject:LOL:
 
Bloody good for hand held then. :)

Are these still showing the bird less than 1:1. Are you sure you've squeezed the best you can out of the processing?
 
Thanks Mike & CT. Not sure if I am getting the best out of the processing, it's one of those things I'm learning as I go on mainly by trial and error as well as trying to learn and understand all these photographic terms you use (eg. whats this 1:1 mean that you ask about).Tried noise reduction on one of the shots what do you think

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best kingfisher pix for a long time
then we find out they're hand held
wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

seriously - incredible pix - well done (and do stop grinning!)
 
lammie said:
Thanks Mike & CT. Not sure if I am getting the best out of the processing, it's one of those things I'm learning as I go on mainly by trial and error as well as trying to learn and understand all these photographic terms you use (eg. whats this 1:1 mean that you ask about).Tried noise reduction on one of the shots what do you think

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Click to expand...

The noise reduction has made the background look loads better. I never run NR on the actual subject though as it does tend to lose some of the fine feather detail.

When I say 1:1, I mean are the birds in your shots smaller than when viewing your original shot at full size? (1:1 means full size). It's possible that if you can show the birds bigger, you'll be able to crop tighter - it all depends on the quality of the original shot.
 
Thanks mmcp for your comments and CT for your explanation of 1:1. I did do the noise reduction on all of the shot, I'll have a go at trying it on the background only. Do you use PS or like me use something similar to the Noiseware Community Edition that someone on here posted some time ago.
 
I use Paint Shop Pro Lammie which has a NR tool called 'Edge preserving Smooth'
 
They're great pictures but I agree with others that there seems to be something a little wrong with the image quality.

I wouldn't expect to see that amount of noise if you're shooting at only ISO 200 or ISO 320, unless you've seriously under-exposed them and then recovered them in the post-processing. I wouldn't have thought that's likely though.

I think this is JPEG artefacting. You've got a very very busy background and the JPEG compression will struggle with it. The algorithm thinks it needs to use a load of bytes to preserve as much of the detail in the background as it can, and the result is that the image quality generally is seriously degraded. I'd be willing to bet that it doesn't look that bad when you're editing the original shot (you did shoot RAW, didn't you?!), but the "noise" only appears when you save as JPEG. Am I right?
 
Stewart, you could be correct. I take the pictures in RAW then convert them to TIFF. To post them on this site I use IrfanView 4.0 to process them for posting on here, this converts them to jpeg. What method/route would you suggest I use for posting on here if this is the case, and yes you are correct that it gets a lot worse after converting to jpeg. I also notice that it is a lot worse on other shots that have this type of background.
 
Hmm.... thinks...

Those pictures are all 800 x 640-660 pixels and around 140-150kB. Those are pretty reasonable numbers. Basically, what I think we're finding is that the JPEG algorithms simply cannot compress the pictures into that space without degradation.

Options?
1. Resize them smaller (e.g. 600 x 500ish), but use a higher JPEG quality setting so that they still take up about 150kB.
2. Keep them at 800 x 650ish, use a higher JPEG quality setting, and live with the fact that you'll have to host them elsewhere and provide links to where they're hosted rather than inserting them directly into your posts.
3. You could try using a Gaussian blur or something like that to remove all the clutter in the background. You don't want it anyway. Then the JPEG compression wouldn't have to work so hard and it might preserve better quality.
 
Really nice shots that I would be pleased with..(y)

I travel hundreds of miles every day and never ever come across Kingfishers..:(

Any tips on where to find these lovely birds..:shrug:
 
Well done Lammie (y) it's a great feeling just to get close to these birds.
 
Congrats on the pics lammie (y)
2nd bird Ive seen on here today that Ive yet to see in the flesh.
Interesting read too.
Im still lazy ... shooting in Jpeg and have never tried a noise reduction programme ... guess I should smarten up!
 
Beautiful birds, I wish I could find one to photograph :)
 
Thanks for all your comments, very much appreciated. I think being able to see and photograph one of these birds is down to a lot of luck and patience. But as Mitch said it is a great feeling to get close to them.
 
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