Hello Cocky !

[Nikon boy]

Hello, I went to Melbourne Zoo last Saturday, weather was o/cast
and by the time i got to the Bird enclosure it was late afternoon and very dark, this is one of quite a few of many images i took of this attractive/cheeky birds,
Nikon D2X using jpeg fine, 400 iso 125 sec,H.S. Crop, Nikon 300mm 2.8 (af not afs !) and monopod, basicaly straight out of the camera, prints up well on my Pixma 5000 at A4,
The camera is extremely filmlike in its ability to produce such fine ,smooth detail that prints like no other digital camera i have seen,
i have purchased a 250gb external hard drive and my next step is to update RAM, as i am experimenting with RAW and the file sizes are huge,
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[nito]

Hey Nikon boy. I think the shot is underexposed. If you are shooting in RAW its very easy to fix with exposure compensation or curves.

[meicw]

Hi Nikon Boy. I think you have done well. The lighting in the great bird aviary is not good even on bright sunny days. BTW I have not seen any cockies there in all my visits.

Regards
Meicw

[robboh]

Hey Nikon boy. I think the shot is underexposed. If you are shooting in RAW its very easy to fix with exposure compensation or curves.

I dont necessarily think its underexposed, there is just quite a large contrast range (look at the highlights on side of the head and the edge of the wing, which look like they have blown). Difficult lighting to find something that looks good; blow out the highlights and it looks naff or else keep the highlights under control and then the rest of the pic is dark. Fill flash might have helped, though that bird is a reasonable distance away?? Possibly worth a composite image in photoshop of 2 exposures out of the RAW?

My bigger issue with the pic is that in this small webimage image, the eye looks quite soft/OOF and the feet look sharper. Though it is hard to tell as the image is quite small. Still, 1/125s at an effective 600mm (HSC crop = 2x crop factor) on a monopod isnt bad going

[Nikon boy]

Hi Robboh, the cockys eye is tack sharp when printed,it was very very dark in the avairy and my shutter speed etc was as good as i could get it, it is a small web image though, what exactly is the size i should be using ?,

and i do need to advance my Raw shooting skills, (these were all jpegs)
but the files are so big everything needs to be improved on, my c/f card size, my ram p/c size, my editing skills etc etc etc,,,, D2x takes huge files,

[robboh]

Hi Robboh, the cockys eye is tack sharp when printed,it was very very dark in the avairy and my shutter speed etc was as good as i could get it, it is a small web image though, what exactly is the size i should be using ?

I thought that it might have been that
I reckon you did pretty well with that shot. As you said, very dark in there and correspondingly a slow shutter speed. Not to mention what looks like quite contrasty light!

Most people seem to recommend a longest side of ~800pixels for web viewing.

I personally think thats a bit large for portrait orientated shots as you cant view the picture in its entirity on a 1024x768 display, so I tend to do portrait orientations at 600pixels high. For landscape orientations, I reckon to stick with the 800pixels wide.

A JPEG optimisaition of 7 seems to give a reasonable sized file (~125kb) with few major artifacts. Dont forget to sharpen after the resampling.

Maybe you could post us a bigger version once you have had a play??

and i do need to advance my Raw shooting skills, (these were all jpegs) but the files are so big everything needs to be improved on, my c/f card size, my ram p/c size, my editing skills etc etc etc,,,, D2x takes huge files,

Know the feeling and Im just working with D70 RAW files. Waiting for Nikon Capture with D2X RAW files would drive me nuts!!

[Nikon boy]

Thanks Robboh, when i next get to Auckland i'll buy you a Steinlager,
they tell me it goes down quicker than ''One Australia''