Creature of the Night
by Roman Kurywczak
Thanks all for the comments on the previous post and because some of you questioned high ISO usage.....I wanted to share with you why I love the Mark III. I have done many landscape images at ISO 6400 so I wanted to experiment with it when this gator swam up to me in Everglades NP last year. This one required all the technical knowledge I could muster from my landscape images. I knew my setting for the stars and sky would be f4 for 30 seconds and ISO 6400 but my first attempt at painting the FG with the gator was a ghost gator....pretty cool but I wanted him sharp. When he swam back to me again....I was able to get my flash out and fire it to freeze/illuminate him and then paint the rest of the FG with a headlamp. All tripod mounted except flash manually fired. I did run noise ninja inn PP'ing and removed a star/planet reflection in the water.
Comments
8 commentsI like the night work you've been posting. On this particular one, the gator needs to be more prominent or closer if that's possible. Before reading your notes, I had to search the image for the creature identified in the caption. I do like the color and the mood as well.
I love the Mark 3 for its ISO performance amongst others and have tried night shots at ISO6400, but to be honest I do not consider this to be 'usable' for larger prints. I am curious to know what size you would be comfortable printing this on?
By the way I did some high ISO comparisons the other day between the 1D3 and the 5D2. Lots of people say the 5d2 is better. My personal conclusion is that they are on par showing very similar noise levels. Of course the 5d2 with its many more pixels will allow you to print images larger before that noise becomes evident. Therefore it would be my choice for images like this. That said, somehow I have the feeling the 1d3 pixels are slightly better pixels, although I cannot give a technical or scientific explanation for that.
The end result of this technical "marvel" is a very unique and interesting animalscape. One of the things I like the most about the technical revolution we're living through right now is the ability to photograph things that we couldn't even dream of shooting just a few years back. This image is a fine example of that.
I like the image as presented, but if it were mine I'd consider cropping a sliver off the bottom and lowering the gator even further in the image. Like many animalscapes, I don't think this media (i.e., web presentation) really does them justice - I suspect this would make a wonderful and intriguing print...
Cheers...thanks for sharing this...
Brad
Brad.......It's like the wild west of film days.....I get to try and push the boundaries every time out!!! The sky is the limit!!!
Vincent.....I have made 13x19 prints very succesfully. Noise Ninja is excellent.....but the learning curve is quite steep to get perfection....so much so that I go back and re-work some images You can see some examples in my galery of the landscape image. Needless to say....I could only dream of this a few years back......so dreams do come true!!!
and BTW.....I am eagerly awaiting the Mark IV!!!