That's one of the best wildlife images I've seen this year. Not sure it would hold up to a much bigger size (saw it on your website) at ISO 640, but I'd sure want to see it in a medium sized print. At ISO 400 that would be a highly marketable print. Might be anyway, at a modest size. Let the chick's left wing touch her wing in the image and it's not the great photo it is; the chick's tilt in the water and that little gap between mother and chick are the heart of it. Light is perfect. No distracting elements, clean as it can be. Great work.
That's one of the best wildlife images I've seen this year. Not sure it would hold up to a much bigger size (saw it on your website) at ISO 640, but I'd sure want to see it in a medium sized print. At ISO 400 that would be a highly marketable print. Might be anyway, at a modest size. Let the chick's left wing touch her wing in the image and it's not the great photo it is; the chick's tilt in the water and that little gap between mother and chick are the heart of it. Light is perfect. No distracting elements, clean as it can be. Great work.
Thanks very much Dan, I appreciate the comment. Personally I never shoot high ISO due to the loss of acuity either due to the noise itself or due to noise reduction software. With the D810 I try to shoot ISO 400 or lower but will bump it up to 640 when light-challenged (which is quite often). I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I use a 5k iMac and post my images on my flickr site at full resolution for my own personal enjoyment. I tend to find high resolution images that look great on a 5k glossy monitor don't always reproduce as well on "standard" resolution monitors with matte finishes, which can exacerbate image graininess.
Interesting comment about the position of the chick...I had several frames to chose from that were similar but chose this one precisely because the chick was fully separated from the adult and was stretching its winglets providing some interest. Indeed, out of several thousand images I took over the week this was the one I processed first when we got home as I liked it best.
14 stitched 3-shot bracketed shots (total of 42 frames) from the 24-120mm and the D810...a little too much overlap and ended up at 156mp with a little bit of trimming.
Thanks very much Dan, I appreciate the comment. Personally I never shoot high ISO due to the loss of acuity either due to the noise itself or due to noise reduction software. With the D810 I try to shoot ISO 400 or lower but will bump it up to 640 when light-challenged (which is quite often). I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I use a 5k iMac and post my images on my flickr site at full resolution for my own personal enjoyment. I tend to find high resolution images that look great on a 5k glossy monitor don't always reproduce as well on "standard" resolution monitors with matte finishes, which can exacerbate image graininess.
Interesting comment about the position of the chick...I had several frames to chose from that were similar but chose this one precisely because the chick was fully separated from the adult and was stretching its winglets providing some interest. Indeed, out of several thousand images I took over the week this was the one I processed first when we got home as I liked it best.
I saw your mother and chick loon shot here and on your site on my 4K monitor, but the monitor quality wasn't the reason for my comment about the shot holding up at ISO 640. On both sites it was perfectly clean to my eyes. But like you, I'm highly biased against anything over 400 where color depth, clarity and detail are the goals. So I was just assuming that the ISO level might not hold that clarity in a large print. Of course I'm aware that sometimes you have to have the shutter speed, or you suddenly have a shot you could have done at 400, but there wasn't time to adjust. Been there....
Your 13 likes so far [28 now!] are well earned. That's a shot that emphasizes the lesson of what is NOT in an image. Absolutely nothing interferes with the power of the photo.
