That is one of the key considerations what are you taking pictures of? Large swathes of even tones show noise offensively much earlier than more mixed tones. One thing I’ll give most cell phone cameras is are starting to do an excellent job of masking noise in high iso or super digital zoom situations with an intelligent dithering. Sometimes it doesn’t work well, and is very obvious, other times it’s pretty amazing how good the images turn out.
If you have image stabilization or some sort, no. Also knowing how to shoot a rifle offhand helps a lot, apply the same fundamentals you used with a rifle and you’ll see you can get slower relatively easily. For most people handheld, no support, they can shoot around 1/100-1/180 with out too much issue regardless of focal length. For macro photography that is a different story, but I’ll leave that stone unturned for now. Modern image stabilization will get you an extra stop at least, if the stars line up right you can get up to 3 stops of stabilization with some systems.
It is easier to move smoothly than it is to stay still. The trick is not over or under swinging your subject, which just takes some practice. I typically shoot race cars at around 1/60 but have gone slower. This is with a 400mm all the way in. A good autofocus set in continual/servo is very helpful as the majority of the time the subjects distance is changing across the pan. You can manually pull focus while panning, but that definitely takes a good bit of practice to learn.
Nikon and Canon do a lot of things really well, but Pentax beats the pants off them with in body IS and full weather sealing on almost all their bodies. I can use 60+ year old lenses with full IS on my K3 with a $9 adapter ring.
Ah gotcha. Not sure what your kit might be lacking but I can highly recommend the Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S VR. Pricing is very good for the quality of the lens. Being an older model it’s not near as pricey as it’s modern cousins. It shoots very well on my F5, being designed for a 35mm negative, it handles the modern ASPC or full frame sensor just fine.
I’ll add a few sample photos I’ve taken with it after I get some sleep.
What are you guys doing as far as storage in terms of what to keep?
I just started with RAW by moving to RAW+JPG mode, and import to Lightroom Classic.
I know Lightroom can let you keep “virtual copies” but I am wondering if I should keep original (especially if RAW) around or not after an export?
I was thinking that outside of perhaps keeping some sample sets for trying out edits, etc, that it makes more sense to call it done, and clear out originals - keep a clean workspace?
Right now I keep it all and suck up the cost (a Synology NAS).
Been thinking about cleaning up based on the rating. I really only care about the dozen 4+ star keepers per year in the long run. So there’s a potential to get rid of thousands of bad and mediocre raw files.
Edit: But then my family takes a couple videos on a smartphone and all that effort goes to waste anyway.
I’m not sure you should follow me in this, but I’ve got the camera’s JPEG engine and colour controls set up just how I like them and therefore shoot “Large JPG” in the camera and don’t bother with RAW any more.
This is partly due to Lightroom going to a subscription model that I didn’t want to be a part of a few years ago, but also due to never printing photos large or displaying them on anything more demanding than a 1080p projector.
But it’s mainly because the bits of photography I like are taking the photo and showing it to other people, anything more than a crop/straighten or light shadow pull or bump (both of which I can do in the photos app once I wifi the photo across to the phone) makes me lose interest…
For anything I’m sending as an iMessage or showing someone casually on my phone it’s more than good enough … in my opinion.
The raw is just in case I get a golden snapshot that really needs a bit of cropping and fine tuning to make it shine. 99% of the pictures do not fit that category and that means the cameras JPEG format is all that’s needed. Maybe crop it slightly on a phone.
But I don’t want to spoil my keepers. My best of Album (all **** and ***** rated pics) is 61 pictures as of today. These are the ones that get printed and placed in living rooms of my relatives. I need them raw.
It brakes my heart when people send these via Whatsapp, which is the death of picture quality and we will realize that latest 10 years from now when trying to look at them in VR.
Sorry @Wes, I was on holidays (cycling tour - see my posts in Where are you Photos) and didn’t get around to writing a comprehensive reply yet. Jenrick’s post has a lot of valid points but I will write up some of my experiences and practices over the weekend.
I stopped shooting RAW at all unless a client wants them. I might have bitten myself in the butt once or twice of the years since then, but honestly, I can’t think of anything right now. With what I primarily shoot (motorsport, aviation, action stuff), I can easily shoot 3-5k photos in a day. I have neither the time nor inclination to be messing around with RAW conversion. I pay good money to the fine folks at Canon and Pentax for camera bodies to output JPG’s that people will pay me for, and they deliver in that regard. Also, I am not a post processing guy if I don’t have to be, so tweaking is minimal usually. If I really need to do major work on a given frame, that’s what photoshop is for.
Storage is currently an external HD, the internal drive of my editing machine, and a separate flash drive for each event that I’m shooting for pay. Physical negatives are in binders, sheeted and labelled.
Two lenses at the moment: Nikkor 18-70 1:3.5-4.5 and a Tamron 70-300 1:4-5.6
Both are AF CPU lenses but don’t have VR. I have had them since I bought the D50 that died recently nearly 20 years ago. I know Tamron’s are a budget lens, it is why I bought it, but it is every bit as good as the Nikkor (which cost twice as much).
I am looking at a Nikon AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR and depending on how kind the Tax Office is to me this year, I have a birthday coming up in October
A zoom lens in that range is a good idea (assuming it zooms easily) because it’s going to be so much easier to acquire the subject at 200mm then zoom in to frame.
My personal long telephoto is the Canon 300 f/4L IS which has a 1.4x extender on it that is probably just rusted on by now … that lens is super nice but took a lot of work to learn how to see something, point the camera at it accurately enough to see it through the viewfinder, then frame and take the photo before the subject moved too close or out of view.
And image stabilisation in long lenses is mandatory in my opinion, it makes it so much easier to handhold, at least for an amateur like me
I imagine I’d do the same if I was shooting as much and as good as you. It is super time consuming. Mostly to fix my inability to take a good photograph from the get go. Software I use is Canon DP4, which makes the process even slower. But it creates nice colors, as far as I can judge.
If you’re using Canons conversion, try shooting in jpg and see how you like the end result. It will largely be the same engine. Caveat if your’e shooting with the exposure pushed so far off center you have to use RAW to recover the image, a jpg isn’t going to be workable. So long as you’re staying roughly at a reasonable exposure you should be good.
ISO: In my experience with Canon cameras you can go pretty high with the ISO. I regularly go to ISO 6400 or 8000 and in very dim lighting conditions even 12800 or 16000, I usually convert to B&W at that point and don’t bother hiding the noise. Correct exposure is absolutely key to getting clean photos - I use the inbuild histogram to gauge the exposure and I have found the AI based noise reduction algorithm in Lightroom to be incredibly good at removing noise while still keeping almost all of the details. While I am not really bothered by the noise in low light stills when I can’t use a tripod or have to keep the shutter speed high, I really can’t stand colour noise in out of focus areas or the blue sky in wild life photos and the Lightroom noise reduction is absolutely amazing at removing it while still keeping the details.
Some examples:
ISO 5000 with 40% LR AI based noise reduction, note that this was their first implementation - the current NR works even better
ISO 6400 with 30% LR AI based NR, less than in the previous example because more would make the fluffy feathers of the goslings really mushy and pixelated.
Before LR had the AI NR I used Topaz Labs NR and then used layers to selectively apply the NR but I have found the LR implementation to be superior to Topaz Labs
ISO 8000, Topaz Labs DeNoise AI
If I am below ISO 1600 and at the correct exposure I usually don’t bother with NR
ISO 1000
ISO 1250
ISO 800
As for storage and backup:
I have a NAS where I store all my RAW files and finished JPEGs, the NAS is backed up to the cloud. I also store all edited JPGs locally on my computer and have them backed up to google photos at full res. so the RAW files are backed up once (Amazon) and the final JPGs/TIFFs are on my NAS, my Computer, Amazon and Google. That’s enough safety for me as someone who purely does it for fun.
I bought myself a new ‘toy’. It is a Burris Thermal Monocular and whilst not a camera as such, but it does take photos (and video).
Amazing how much technology has advanced in the past few decades. This produces clearer images and has more features, let alone being orders of magnitude smaller and lighter, than the Thermal Imager I used in the Army during the early '90s… Back then uncooled TI sensors were only just being developed and were crap.
The display (and video) is a lot clearer than these stills. With a 50Hz refresh rate it accentuates any handshake and a tripod or mount would be needed to show how good the imager is.
These were taken at a distance of about 10m at 1X magnification.
At 4X magnification, at night I could clearly identify Kangaroos at about 600m and even though the video was clear, still images just looked like a blob.
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For those who like a ‘traditional’ night vision look
… that lens is super nice but took a lot of work to learn how to see something, point the camera at it accurately enough to see it through the viewfinder, then frame and take the photo before the subject moved too close or out of view.
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