Coypu - Repost

Gallery: WildlifePosted June 26, 201073 views4 comments

Nutria - I photographed this large, herbivorous, semiaquatic rodent while on a walk around the lake in Nassau Bay Texas. Originally native to temperate South America, it has since been introduced to North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, primarily by fur ranchers.

Thanks to Angela for loaning me her D300 while my 7D is in the Canon hospital.

On another note, while preparing the image for posting I noticed the small JPEG option was pixilated with a reading of 4 on the quality scale. I had to push it down that low to get close to the 200 KB NPN requires. The large image shows no pixilation when comparing the two images. Can anyone tell me why I had to force the small image to such a low quality?

Would appreciate any comments to help improve my photography skills. Thanks in advance.

Comments

4 comments

Comment posted by Angela McCain on June 26, 2010 at 11:14 AM

Nice image. I suspect that you started with an almost FF photo. That would be about 12MB on this camera and despite changing the size, you will still have a large image. The larger post clearly shows the quality though.

Please post your metadata. That allows us to give you the most help.

I would consider cropping it from the left to the nutria. In fact I can see an OOF leaf and I would crop just to the right of that and eliminate that altogether. Did you do any post-processing sharpening? You may be able to selectively sharpen around the eye. And use the unsharp mask before posting.

Registered on April 19, 2009, 367 Posts, 3589 Comments

Comment posted by Dottie Short on June 26, 2010 at 12:50 PM

I've cropped the image again, cropped out the OOF leaf on the far right, and patched out the OOF leaf top center. I sharpened the original image in Nik post sharpening. Gotta improve my selecting skills in PS, so I redid the sharpening again using Nik. I think the image composition looks much better. I'll reserve comment on the sharpening until I see it on the NPN website.

Metadata: D300, 70-300 mm lens shot at 300mm, ISO 800 (oops thought I was at 400), F8 1/250.

Registered on April 12, 2010, 61 Posts, 375 Comments

Comment posted by Angela McCain on June 26, 2010 at 1:57 PM

Like what you've done with the image. Crop is good. Eye appears sharper. ISO 800 was fine here. Look at your speed of 1/250. If your ISO was 400, then speed would have been 1/125. This is very hard to do, even with the IS lens. You also could have opened up the aperture some to get a faster shutter speed, especially since the nutria appears to be all in one plane- you didn't need a lot of DOF. Your third option to keep the f8, is to use the compensation at -0.3. There is a lot of light near the head anyway. You can almost always retrieve darks, but white is hard.

Registered on April 19, 2009, 367 Posts, 3589 Comments

Comment posted by Lon Sharp on June 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM

I feel the composition is much improved in the re-posted edition. The grasses/reeds make for a busy background bu there was nothing you could do about that. I like the rich blue of the water and you managed a good view of the eye. Thanks for sharing.

Registered on December 9, 2007, 258 Posts, 9892 Comments