Great Tit

Well you get a week off work and what does the weather do , dark and miserable! I must have shot over 200 shots yesterday and this is the only one I am pretty happy with , before bad light stopped play.
I read somewhere that you shouldn't shoot birds with ISO over 400 how is that possible in winter? With my 40D I can see a diffrence from say ISO 400 to ISO 640 apart from remortgaging the house and getting new gear is there any other way.
Thanks for looking at my photograph and thankyou in advance for your feedback.
Shot Stats;
Cannon 40D Cannon F5.6 400mm Tripod Mounted
F8
1/125
+1/3
iso 640
Al Sevro
Spot Meter
Raw

Hi Adam,

I get the same problem shooting at high iso with my D200. Firstly, as has been mentioned on here a number of times before, if you are going over 400 you may as well go straight to 800, as grain size seems to be as bad on the intermediate stops as it is on a full one stop rise.

As for dealing with the noisy background here, go into Photoshop and open the jpeg file and go to:

Layers - and make a duplicate layer

Filter - either blur then gaussian blur or noise and despeckle (I often do both)

Then use the eraser tool to bring out the sharper bird in the layer underneath.

Then back to Layer, merge visible

Finally, save the new jpeg.

Simples!

That advice is written for Photoshop elements, but something similar should be possible in other editing programmes. If you don't have a suitable editing programme, elements is a lot cheaper than a new camera.



David

Thanks for the tips David Ill have a play around with this this afternoon

A little big in the frame Adam, but a nice specimen. Personally I would try to avoid square formats if you can, unless the image really suits it. You have some nice detail and think you can get some more out in the dark chest areas with a bit more PS. David is right about ISO, avoid the intermediate ones, always go to the 'true' ones, ie 100, 200, 400... certainly the 20D or is it the 40D doesn't really like going over 400 for the reasons stated above.

Re noise, everyone has their own way of dealing with it, however I would suggest you always work on the 16bit TIFF rather than JPEG, as that is your next stage from RAW, as a JPEG it is less in quality and ultimately the quality will suffer IMHO. Good luck.

Steve

Colour noise is obvious, especially in the blacks. So you could blur the entire image, maybe 2 pixels (for this size) then goto Edit - Fade Gaussian Blur and set the layer mode to "color", this will effectively leave you with only luminance noise.
I often do something similar to David but I copy the image, noise reduce the BG layer (be subtle!) and mask in the subject....

Nice specimen!

Well it is a lovely capture despite the technical problems. You mention that it was dark and miserable, was the original shot a bit underexposed by any chance as I found that the 40D is quite unforgiving of any exposure errors especially at the higher iso's?

Great Tit are not easy to get right and I think this is a superb composition. Nice colour and a good pose.