Sometimes you search forever and can’t find anything and then other times the wildlife lands right in front of you. That was the case with this young great-horned owl early one morning in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. I had pulled over to the side of the road at about 4:45 because I saw something moving in a tree. Suddenly this owl landed right in front of my car. I was able to capture a couple quick shots using just my headlights, along with a high ISO and low shutter speed. Nikon D800 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 400mm) ISO 3200, f/4 at 1/30th of a second
That’s an awesome photo! Sean, can you explain which post production software you use and how did you handle the noise reduction given that ISO 3200 was used? I would normally see lots of noise in my images at ISO 3200 and I tend to struggle with NR.
Thanks Sue. I almost never use any sort of noise reduction. I don’t like the plastic-y look it tends to give photos and I generally don’t mind a little noise/grain. Occasionally, if there’s a ton of nice out of focus bokeh that’s full of noise I’ll use Nik Dfine as a Photoshop plug-in. This gives me a layered file and then I’ll erase all the noise reduction on everything but that bokeh. That way I’m not applying any noise reduction to the detailed ares of the shot and messing up the sharpness. On this owl image I didn’t use any noise reduction. But I did expose to the right and therefore captured plenty of detail in all the shadowed ares. Then in Lightroom I globally darkened the image by moving the exposure slider just a bit and also applied a slight s tone curve. If I had underexposed the image and then tried to do the opposite and lighten it, I would have seen a lot of noise.
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Sometimes you search forever and can’t find anything and then other times the wildlife lands right in front of you. That was the case with this young great-horned owl early one morning in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. I had pulled over to the side of the road at about 4:45 because I saw something moving in a tree. Suddenly this owl landed right in front of my car. I was able to capture a couple quick shots using just my headlights, along with a high ISO and low shutter speed.
That’s an awesome photo! Sean, can you explain which post production software you use and how did you handle the noise reduction given that ISO 3200 was used? I would normally see lots of noise in my images at ISO 3200 and I tend to struggle with NR.
Thanks Sue. I almost never use any sort of noise reduction. I don’t like the plastic-y look it tends to give photos and I generally don’t mind a little noise/grain. Occasionally, if there’s a ton of nice out of focus bokeh that’s full of noise I’ll use Nik Dfine as a Photoshop plug-in. This gives me a layered file and then I’ll erase all the noise reduction on everything but that bokeh. That way I’m not applying any noise reduction to the detailed ares of the shot and messing up the sharpness. On this owl image I didn’t use any noise reduction. But I did expose to the right and therefore captured plenty of detail in all the shadowed ares. Then in Lightroom I globally darkened the image by moving the exposure slider just a bit and also applied a slight s tone curve. If I had underexposed the image and then tried to do the opposite and lighten it, I would have seen a lot of noise.
great color is this color of the owl, or is this color due to your head lights, ) great pic. and color.
——- Is the light
——- Glowing in these eyes
——- A measure of surprise
——- Surfeit in a sensitive orb
——- Used to find
——- Its very own .
Awesome shot! But typical expression 😉
Beautiful.