A few blurred black kites...

Giphsub

:doh

Alright these were all hand held with the Bigma. The situation didn't allow for a tripod or monopod. The birds were all pretty much circling overhead and I had a limited range of sky above me because of trees. I took a lot of shots and these few were the only reasonable ones.

I know the lack of sharpness is due to me not using a tripod/monopod, but these pics also seem quite grainy to me. Almost all were taken at around 1200 iso, and I over-exposed and had to do some RAW pp to save them. Would that, coupled with the movement account for the noise? I have had similar results on still shots using a monopod too, which I find a little baffling. I have also hard some very good results with the Bigma...

Any comments, suggestions or hints welcome.

#1


#2


#3


#4


#5


#6


#7

BigAl

Giphsub wrote:

Alright these were all hand held with the Bigma. The situation didn't allow for a tripod or monopod. The birds were all pretty much circling overhead and I had a limited range of sky above me because of trees. I took a lot of shots and these few were the only reasonable ones.

I know the lack of sharpness is due to me not using a tripod/monopod, but these pics also seem quite grainy to me. Almost all were taken at around 1200 iso, and I over-exposed and had to do some RAW pp to save them. Would that, coupled with the movement account for the noise? I have had similar results on still shots using a monopod too, which I find a little baffling. I have also hard some very good results with the Bigma...

Any comments, suggestions or hints welcome.

Mike, the noise would be almost exclusively as a result of the high ISO. When you start fiddling around in PP, you start exaggerating the noise, making it worse.

Handholding the Bigma would cause blurring due to shake - this is most obvious on the trailing edges of the wings in the third pic. It will be present in the others as well. I think with the last three you were starting to get the hang of it.

I did some planes handheld last Friday, and also didn't get results as good as I'd hoped - it does require practice. Having awkward light doesn't help either, but having stuck with ISO 400 did help minimise the noise.

Giphsub

Thanks for commenting BigAl. #6 was iso 560, and it too is quite noisy. I went back to take a look at some others that have had a similar result and found these pics taken at iso 200. They are reasonably heavy crops and sharpened as much as I dare, but the pictures were not quite as clean as I expected them to be in this particular series.

Giphsub

good plane shots by the way. You didn't seem to get much blur going on in those