Following on from my blurry telephoto pics.. Anyone use a pistol grip for stability? Does it help? How do you press the shutter button?

Wow, seems like a blast from the past – not seen a SLR pistol grip for a long time, and TBH not sure they’d help – telephoto pics are a lot about technique, and if you’re getting a lot of blurred images then you might need to look at things like shutter speed (faster than the focal length of the lens you’re using). They used to be used with cable releases IIRC.

If you’re in a static location, then a good tripod would be a better investment than a pistol grip.

As above – plus monopods can help too lighter and easier to carry around than a tripod.

image stabilizer, £1
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLlJl7TbXTA[/video]

I’ve got one. Got it from ebay for £2. It’s a 1960s thing I guess.

It had a cable shutter release, so I removed that and put a corded remote release for my camera in its place (£5 from ebay).

It works brilliantly. I’d post a photo but it’s in the attic. So I guess it’s not that useful.

Or you could buy a modern one… which comes with the correct remote release etc. http://www.bushhawk.com

I’d guess you would risk being short by an armed response unit if you put a big lens on one of those.

and if you’re getting a lot of blurred images then you might need to look at things like shutter speed

Still blurry at 1/2500, although this is now at wide aperture, which I think might be something to consider.

Monopod was on my Christmas list..

If you’re getting blurred images at 1/2500 something else is going on.

Post some examples?

I did on the other thread I think?

And I say blurry.. lack of definition I think.. fuzzy perhaps. But it is okay when I take test images… Will look out some of the latest ones. It may be that I am expecting it to be as sharp as the kit lens and it’s just not?

rule of thumb is shutter speed should be 1/focal length for a sharp image, so at 1/2500sec you should have no issue at all with blurry images.

Sounds like something else is wrong (unless you sit on a washing machine while it’s on spin to take your pics??)

Can you post some example images of ‘camera shake’ at 1/2500s? Might help work out what’s going on…

Still blurry at 1/2500, although this is now at wide aperture, which I think might be something to consider

You’ll tend to find a camera and/or lens will produce it’s sharpest shots in the middle of it’s range. Using an f2.8 lens at f2.8 for example…. It’ll be sharper at f5.6. Same for the zoom: as you reach the extremes of zoom, quality can drop. And a prime lens will be sharper than a zoom anyway….

This is why I choose my lenses carefully, read the reviews, look at test shots. There are some really sharp lenses available for little money, if you know what to look for. 🙂

I’ve just had a look on your other thread – 1/500s at f5.6 with ISO of 640.
It doesn’t look particularly like camera shake is the issue from what I can see.

Could be that your depth of field is too shallow to capture everything that you want to be sharp, coupled with not focussing on exactly the right place (birds eye for example). Perhaps f/8 would be better, but you then might see camera shake…

How critical are you with focussing? Could be that you are just off with your focussing/choosing your focus point. AF can get confused with lots of reflect-y snow & bird’s feathers can pose a problem too (particularly in low light).

And what is the high noise performance of your camera like? Some camera’s apply so much noise reduction at higher ISO values that it smooths all the detail and leaves images a little ‘pastelly’.
Can you shoot RAW? Might be worth taking some RAW/some JPEG and comparing results?

Ok this I guess is clearly not camera shake, but it’s fairly fuzzy – this is a crop at 100% zoom. Now bear in mind I am not much more than newbie so I have no idea if I’ve done something wrong or my expectations are unreasonable or what. NB these pics are both JPGs

pigeon crop by molgrips, on Flickr

1/2500, f8, ISO640. Could just be out of focus to be honest since it was just waved skywards and the pigeon is not in the centre of the shot.

squirrel by molgrips, on Flickr

1/800 f7.1 ISO640

Both straight from the camera, but I think without any NR. Taken in Sport mode which I think dispenses with it.

These were taken ‘from the hip’ so to speak – ie see bird/animal, point, snap. AF set to centre only. Some of the ones on the other thread were taken with MF adjustment. The pigeon was taken completely dynamically as it flew overhead and there still really isn’t any motion blur or shake, so I suppose the exposure is plenty fast enough.

I am shooting in RAW+JPG because I have a big memory card, but as of yet I am still fairly ignorant of what all the NR sliders do and how to get the best from them. I definitely need a book.

EDIT: The more I think about it the more I think that at my budget in those lighting conditions the results really aren’t that bad. There are definitely much sharper images online with the same setup but I think they were closer to the subject and/or in much better light.

Top one is really hard conditions to shoot in Molgrips. I reckon the autofocus is struggling. Is there a setting for the AF so it can track a moving subject? And if the lens it at full stretch that will knock the quality down. A bit of footwork and patinece helps, get closer to the subject and wait! 🙂

I’m no wildlife photographer, and I had to take a lot of shots to get these, and be in the right place at the right time…. 17-70mm lens…..

IMG_6515 by PeterPoddy, on Flickr

Bird by PeterPoddy, on Flickr

Yeah as noted I was just wandering about the place looking for the Jay that I see every bloody day when I don’t have my camera.. That pigeon is way up in the sky flying at 30mph overhead, and the squirrel is a good 30-40ft away.

Those gull pics were taken on high clifftops on the southern tip of the Avalon peninsula of Newfoundland. There was a VERY stiff, blustery wind hitting us, straight off the whole of the Atlantic. Very tricky conditions…..Tuck yer elbows in, brace against the wind, let the AF track the subject for a couple of seconds to stabilise, gently squeeze the shutter. 🙂
All I can see a pistol grip doing is getting in the way, TBH.

A truly wonderful, if bleak, landscape, with the curvature of the earth plainly visible:

IMG_6410 by PeterPoddy, on Flickr

And there were icebergs too = Pretty chilly!

IMG_5839 by PeterPoddy, on Flickr

Just looks to me like a combination of low light/low contrast/fairly distant subjects.

The pigeon looks out of focus, which from your description of how the shot was taken sounds likely. I have lots of pics like this too 🙂

I’d have thought that even in Sport mode at ISO640 there’ll be some form of in-camera noise reduction going on.

For the squirrel, was the AF point centred over the little blighter? How much of the total shot would you say your 100% crop represents. I am often surprised how ‘unsharp’ certain features in an image are once you zoom into 100% and have a look at the whole image in sections.

Have you checked that there’s not something in the menu set to something like ‘default sharpness: -1/soft etc’ Easy to do and not realise or forget about.

I don’t have any pics on photobucket to add for comparison that can be viewed full size…….

A truly wonderful, if bleak, landscape, with the curvature of the earth plainly visible:

If that was taken at 17mm, I’d expect it to be more like lens distortion….. 😆

Well, you could see it with the naked eye. Point taken though. 🙂

Molgrips, exif info for the 1st seagull shot of mine:

Camera Canon EOS 400D Digital
Exposure 0.003 sec (1/400)
Aperture f/11
Focal Length 70 mm
ISO Speed 200
Continuous Drive Continuous
Focus Mode AI Servo AF
Contrast Low
Saturation High
Metering Mode Evaluative
Focus Range Not Known
Canon Exposure Mode Program AE
Lens Type Sigma 17-35mm f2.8-4 EX Aspherical HSM
Lens 17 – 70mm

Underlined the focus mode – Servo AF tracks the subject as it moves. So I centre the focus point on the subject and give it a second to stabilise (Holding the shutter button half way down) AF just cannot operate fast enough to just ‘point and shoot’ unless you spend £1000s more than we both have… You have to compensate for it. I reckon that’s why yours are blurry. 🙂

I’d have thought that even in Sport mode at ISO640 there’ll be some form of in-camera noise reduction going on.

When you put it in sport mode it seems to default to continuous shooting without refocusing, and the little NR symbol goes away so I am thinking it’s set up for recording as many frames as possible in quick succession. The images are definitely not that noisy normally.

I do have a continuous AF mode but I turned it off for shooting in the trees because camera wobble is such that it keeps focusing on twigs and branches that are to the fore of the subject. There is a setting to stop it doing that but I haven’t tried it.

But the issue is at that zoom level (600mm equivalent) and with subjects that far away I can’t keep the centre target over the subject necessarily, the image is wobbling too much.

Here’s the full squirrel – aimlessly poked around with the sliders a bit too..

full squirrel by molgrips, on Flickr

molgrips, I still reckon it’s just a combination of things (low light, low contrast, fairly distant subject, lens operating at limit of it’s range, ‘soft’ aperture’ – most lenses are sharpest about f8-f11 I think, potentially inprecise focussing) although the one thing it pretty much isn’t I would say (to any large degree) is camera shake.

Looking at the zoomed in image of the squirrel, the fur is relatively well defined & sharp (along the tail) but the whole image is just a bit ‘soft’.
I’d have thought the slightest camera shake would show up in the fur detail.

When you put it in sport mode it seems to default to continuous shooting without refocusing, and the little NR symbol goes away so I am thinking it’s set up for recording as many frames as possible in quick succession. The images are definitely not that noisy normally.

I guess they all do something a bit different, but in sport mode, my D80 (I think) goes to wide area AF, cont AF and tries for the widest aperture/fastest shutter speed it can. I think it also goes to auto ISO.
Not sure about the NR, but it does sound like yours is being turned off.

HAve you looked at the menus to see what settings you’ve got for things like contrast, colour etc.?? I have mine set so the sharpness is +1 from default as it’s a bit soft as standard. Perhaps you need to have a play with these to get a bit more out of the standard jpegs??

I may have set sharpness to +1, can’t remember.

But yes I agree, combination of factors showing up the limits of my kit and the medium of photography in general 🙂

It’s all a learning experience.

Check out this picture:

sign by molgrips, on Flickr

The writing on the sign is pretty sharp but the background is all wibbly, which presumably is a feature of the lens design. I think that what might look like camera shake is actually this wibblyness showing up on out-of-focus branches and leaves and things in front of the target subject – see the leaves to the right of the dunnock from the other thread, and the other out of focus bits.

Just looks to me like a combination of low light/low contrast/fairly distant subjects.

I’d agree.

The writing on the sign is pretty sharp but the background is all wibbly, which presumably is a feature of the lens design. I think that what might look like camera shake is actually this wibblyness showing up on out-of-focus branches and leaves and things in front of the target subject – see the leaves to the right of the dunnock from the other thread, and the other out of focus bits.

The wibbly stuff is bokeh, which is the pattern formed by out of focus stuff. On top of bokeh you have sharpening. Sharpening something in focus makes it sharper. Sharpening bokeh makes it grainy and nasty.

Shoot raw. Sharpen in your raw converter, or in the case of lots of bokeh save two images, one sharpened, one not. Then load both as layers into a photo editor and use the unsharpened background and the sharpened subject. There are several ways of achieving the same end by-the-way. What you can also do with nasty bokeh is blur it in a photo editer (but not the subject).

The same things apply to noise. Letting the camera remove noise also removes details, which is where you end up with people looking plastic. You can using similar approaches to above just remove noise where it shows, in shadows for example, and preserve the detail in the subject.

I have four sliders in my raw converter.. I intend to look up what they do over the Christmas break 🙂

I heard about taking multiple shots and merging them from a colleage the other day. The problem is with birds is that they tend to move about so getting multiple shots is hard 🙂

I wonder though – would it be possible to cut the bird out of the shot and put it on a different layer, thereby being able to process the back/foreground with different settings to the subject?

No, take one shot but process them differently.

I wonder though – would it be possible to cut the bird out of the shot and put it on a different layer, thereby being able to process the back/foreground with different settings to the subject?

Yes, that’s the other approach.

It all depends where you do your processing. You could process your raw with no sharpening, then load into an editor and copy the subject into a new layer. Sharpen the subject layer, not the background layer (or even blur the background layer).

No, take one shot but process them differently.

Oh yeah – I’ll try reading posts properly next time 🙂

Does sharpening have to be done at the raw stage? Surely not..? In terms of image file, what’s the actual difference between RAW and JPG? I mean, what is it about RAW that lets you edit contrast and exposure etc etc better than in JPGs? Is it not just a bitmap with 8 bits per pixel?

Those gull pics were taken on high clifftops on the southern tip of the Avalon peninsula of Newfoundland.

Sorry, but they’re not Gulls, they are Gannets.

Hey, I’m a below average photographer, and I know even less about birds. So shoot me down in flames, why not?

🙁

Does sharpening have to be done at the raw stage? Surely not..?

No, you can do it on any file. But the raw is your negative, it has all the information in it. If you process it and save it as a jpeg you’ve just trashed a load of information. If you save in a lossless format then that’s not an issue though.

I sharpen in raw because sharpening after the fact would add an extra step in my workflow. Unless I’m doing selective sharpening, then I’ll do the sharpening (or more/different sharpening) in an image editor.

In terms of image file, what’s the actual difference between RAW and JPG? I mean, what is it about RAW that lets you edit contrast and exposure etc etc better than in JPGs? Is it not just a bitmap with 8 bits per pixel?

It’s the raw output from the sensor. So… in the case of exposure there’s more dynamic range data in there than you can see. Slide the sliders and dark becomes light or light becomes dark.

Because a jpeg is a compressed file there’s no use holding information that’s not shown. Not much point sliding sliders as dark is just dark and light is just light (there are levels of compression so this is all relative).

As you process the raw to a jpeg the end result is the same as shooting in jpeg, but if you balls up the exposure and have the raw you can still produce the image you wanted. Or… if you want to expose different parts of the same image you can (i.e. lift shadows, recover highlights etc).

It also means you don’t have to worry about white balance as you can fix that easily.

Compression aside – are you saying there’s more than 8 bits per pixel in a raw? Sounds like it 🙂 Is the dynamic range of a raw greater than that of a computer monitor?

Depends on the camera. My dslr is 12. 14 is common (oddly at least some 14 bit cameras have 12 bit sensors so unless it’s a floating point number thing I have a feeling the other 2 bits were added by the marketing team).

And yes, the dynamic range is greater than the monitor.

Thanks for the advice.. it must be a right pain to have to explain this stuff to noobs.