]*]*]*] Wolf's School of Flight [*[*[*[

Wolfsatz

Senior Member
50 Feet Up!
Dove by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Don't worry love.. I got the NightWatch
Got the Watch by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

VA Cardinal

VA Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

VA Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

WoodPecker
Woodpecker by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Rose Bush Cover

VA Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Sun Flower
VA Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

3 by 3
VA Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Forever you WingMan

Forever Your Wingman by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Let's Skate
Lets Skate by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Take Out Available
Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
 

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
LOL @ "wingman" :)

Hey man, I'm not familiar with the P900, so forgive my ignorance, but do you have the ability to manually focus that thing? If not, are you able to override the auto focus system and make it focus on something other than what it chooses (like the "focus and recompose" technique, or using focus points)? If so, I would definitely try doing either one. Your camera is focusing on what is closest to the lens, and that's not always your subject. So you've got really cute birds in really cute poses...and you're ending up with a nice sharp picture of a branch. If you can work it so it's the bird that's laser sharp, I think you'll be amazed at how much more you like your pics!

:encouragement:

edit: here's a quick example of what I mean. This baby jay fell out of its nest and ended up under our porch. When it stuck its head through a lattice opening I framed the shot in my viewfinder. If I had left everything on Auto, my camera would have focused on the porch lattice on the left side of the picture since that was the part closest to the lens, and that would have put the bird out of focus. But by choosing Single Point focus mode, then putting that point on the bird's eye while I recomposed slightly, the camera ignored the left side of the porch and kept the bird's face sharp:

Bird in Lattice 3.jpg


See what I mean? And that was with an entry level D3300. Your P900 can probably do this no problem at all I'm guessing, so give it a shot! Seems like you have an awful lot of birds in your yard you can practice on :)
 
Last edited:

Wolfsatz

Senior Member
LOL @ "wingman" :)

Hey man, I'm not familiar with the P900, so forgive my ignorance, but do you have the ability to manually focus that thing? If not, are you able to override the auto focus system and make it focus on something other than what it chooses (like the "focus and recompose" technique, or using focus points)?

:encouragement:

See what I mean? A

Yes.. I know what you mean.

That's has been one of my main 'concerns' of the camera.... however, before I criticize the equipment too harshly.. I should read the manual and get familiar with the different features. I have not even register the camera at Nikon yet. Everything so far has been just by intuition... including how to transfer pix to my phone wirelessly.

I will research Single Point Focus on the P900.. that should help me not missed some great shots.... as it has been frustrating at times focusing on the wrong things and even the focus and recompose technique has not worked. .. some times even on the far background instead of the feather subjects.

However... I do not necessarily want all the shots in its total focus... so I was playing with the silhouettes. Some of these below was using soft focus.

Contrast by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

WoodPecker by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
 

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
Yes.. I know what you mean.

That's has been one of my main 'concerns' of the camera.... however, before I criticize the equipment too harshly.. I should read the manual and get familiar with the different features. I have not even register the camera at Nikon yet. Everything so far has been just by intuition... including how to transfer pix to my phone wirelessly.

I will research Single Point Focus on the P900.. that should help me not missed some great shots.... as it has been frustrating at times focusing on the wrong things and even the focus and recompose technique has not worked. .. some times even on the far background instead of the feather subjects.

However... I do not necessarily want all the shots in its total focus... so I was playing with the silhouettes. Some of these below was using soft focus.

Yeah, getting familiar with the new gear is definitely gonna answer a lot of your questions, I'm sure. And hey - if you can't find it in the manual, or just don't feel like thumbing through 628 pages of jargon, you can always ask away here. A lot of the members here are virtual walking camera databases.

Oh, and if your intent was to take "soft focus" and silhouette shots and you're happy with what you're getting - great! I wasn't criticizing, just offering my thoughts. Go for it :encouragement:
 

Wolfsatz

Senior Member
Yeah, getting familiar with the new gear is definitely gonna answer a lot of your questions, I'm sure. And hey - if you can't find it in the manual, or just don't feel like thumbing through 628 pages of jargon, you can always ask away here. A lot of the members here are virtual walking camera databases.

Oh, and if your intent was to take "soft focus" and silhouette shots and you're happy with what you're getting - great! I wasn't criticizing, just offering my thoughts. Go for it :encouragement:

I like critique... specially from other photographers... some times critique from non photographers only goes so far.

Here's one where I was able to focus quickly and on the right subject.
Tuesday by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
 

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
Here's one where I was able to focus quickly and on the right subject.

Wolf, do you do any post-processing? If so, you should try playing around with some of the tools to see what kind of variations you can make to the same picture. It can be very instructive, and help you quickly decide later how you may or may not want to compose future pictures (plus, it's just a helluva lot of fun).

Take this shot, for instance. I can see why you like it. The bird is more sharply focused than some of your others, and there's an overall soft effect that's quite pleasing. And shooting it through those branches gives it a distinct "feel".

But when you get a picture like this that you like, let your imagination kick in. Ask yourself how it might look if you cropped it differently, or intensified the contrast, or lowered the contrast, etc. There's not harm in manipulating a picture, even a good one, because you can always revert to the original with no harm done if you don't like the adjustments. And if you do like the adjustments, well, there you go. You improved on a picture you might not have thought you could, and maybe that will guide you when you take future pictures. It's a win/win!

For instance, I hope you don't mind but I gave a few tweaks to your picture here just to see. I'm at work and don't have access to my Lightroom program at home, which does an excellent job with this. But even the crummy default viewer on my work PC allows me to crop and do a few basic edits. It even has a "Spot Heal" function, which works horribly but I tried it nonetheless.

See what you think. This is your picture with the right side clutter cropped out, bringing the bird to a more prominent position in the frame. I straightened it just a bit so the feeder bars are vertical, and I slid the "Clarity" slider a smidge. I don't think it's necessarily a keeper, or any better than yours, but it was fun to see what the same picture could look like with just a few seconds worth of messing around:

Wolf's Bird CROP.jpg

One of the things I wanted to try was to erase the branch that bisected the bird's shoulder, out of sheer curiosity how that function worked in this program. It worked terribly, basically making the branch into more of a smudge. If you do have a program like Lightroom/Photoshop, it does a much better job. Here's a picture I shot of a cardinal that had the same thing - a branch across the chest. But with a few clicks of my mouse Lightroom erased it, and so it did not distract from what I thought was a great expression on the bird's face when it spotted me:

Cardinals 5.jpg

So yeah, give that a shot. Even if you like a picture, manipulate it in different ways just for grins and giggles. You might use it, you might not, but I guarantee you'll really start discovering things about composition this way.

:encouragement:
 
Last edited:

mikew_RIP

Senior Member
Sorry if i missed it but do you shoot in burst mode, i found with the P900 a burst of between 3 and 5 frames gave me some keepers more often
 

Wolfsatz

Senior Member
Sorry if i missed it but do you shoot in burst mode, i found with the P900 a burst of between 3 and 5 frames gave me some keepers more often
]

I have not tried that yet... but yes, that will make more good ones ... specially with the little birds, they never stop moving.
@dangespouse
Yes, I do very little editing. For the most part I tried to recreate what my eyes are seeing as far as colours. In the respect to full editing, I am a PURIST at heart. Even when I was already shooting Digital; I still also shot B/W with film.

But since we are on the subject.. what software do you use. I stick to very basic editing tools; either OEM on Iphone, or Flickr.

VA Cardinal by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
 

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
]
@dangespouse
Yes, I do very little editing. For the most part I tried to recreate what my eyes are seeing as far as colours. In the respect to full editing, I am a PURIST at heart. Even when I was already shooting Digital; I still also shot B/W with film.

But since we are on the subject.. what software do you use. I stick to very basic editing tools; either OEM on Iphone, or Flickr.

Lol. When I saw "I am a PURIST" I heard my own voice in my head screaming that same thing 2 or 3 years ago when I got my first DSLR. Like you, I come from a film background (still shoot with my Olympus OM-2s!). So when I was told that photo manipulation was SOP with these digital cameras, I bristled at the idea. "That's cheating! You should be a good enough photographer that your pictures come out the way you want it without any editing at all!" Seriously, I was adamant about that.

Until I learned.

Consider this:

1. Pretty much all the great/professional film photographers of the past century and a half did post-process editing. You've heard of dodging and burning, right? Cropping? Those and many others were standard darkroom techniques for producing a desired result after they took their picture. So post processing is nothing new, not even to "purists" (Ansel Adams reportedly spent years processing "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" - arguably the most lauded photograph of all time - before releasing it. Check out the before and after.)

2. This was the argument that finally won me over. Modern camera sensors record insane amounts of data when you click the shutter button, but here's the thing: it doesn't necessarily show you a true record of what you saw when you bring up the picture on the LiveView screen, your phone, or a monitor. This is particularly true when you shoot RAW. What the camera shows you is kind of a desaturated version of Real Life, allowing you to then play with all the data it stored behind the scenes to make things either true to life, or enhanced.

Why would it do this? Primarily because your eye is a better camera than your camera. Think about it. We automatically white balance, to take just one example. You walk through a room with incandescent lighting and see a white wall, it looks white. Go to the next room with LED lights, and the white wall looks white to you there as well. Walk outside into bright sunlight and look at the snow. Looks white, right? We have AMAZING processors, far better than our cameras. Unless you perfectly dial in the white balance every time the light changes, the white you see in your picture probably won't look like the white you saw when framing the picture. Auto white balance has come a long way and does a great job overall, but even then it can still be fooled if the majority of the picture is either all white or all dark. And when that happens, the camera will under or over expose anything else in the frame. (Here's why.) If you don't compensate when you take the shot, you sure aren't going to have a "PURE!", true-to-life picture unless you post process. It's not cheating. It's compensating for your camera not being as good as your eye. Bring back details in the shadows that your eye saw, but your camera didn't show you! Color correct! Erase that smudge caused by a chunk of dust you didn't know was on your sensor!

BTW, if you shoot in JPEG you'll see your pictures out of camera actually look better than RAW. That's because your camera does some basic post processing in JPEG, making the picture look like what it thinks it should, given all the data it collected on the processor. That's right - even your camera isn't "pure", at least in that mode.

If you like taking pictures and leaving them the way the camera shows them to you, that is absolutely fine. I don't think anyone is gonna argue with you about a matter of personal taste, least of all me. Have a blast with it! I did for good number of months myself, and was quite happy. But seriously, don't think that processing your pictures is somehow "NOT PURE!". History, and technology, argue against that.

Besides, once you get into it, it's a helluva lot of fun. You really should try it - make a copy of your picture to process, then compare it to your OOC (Out Of Camera, ie. unprocessed) version. You will probably be surprised at how often you say, "Now THAT'S what I saw when I took the picture!" at the processed version.

To answer your question: I started with a very basic processor that came with my HP tower, but several months ago started a subscription to Lightroom, with PhotoShop and their cloud service bundled, 10 bucks a month. It's amazing.

Again, I'm not criticizing your choice at all, or your stance on photo purity. If that's the route you want to take, go for it! But if you're doing that because you think your camera is giving you the exact picture you saw in your viewfinder, I hope my information perhaps gives you something to think about. "Post processing" doesn't mean making things look artificial. To the contrary, it often means adjusting for the way DSLR's take and display data to make the shot look real again.

Hope this helped!

:)
 
Last edited:

mikew_RIP

Senior Member
I hear what your saying about purist and i have been known to end up with something that looks a long way off from the original.

When i shot my P900 i took advantage of the long lens and got the hidden in the bush shots, then though i got carried away with the PP.

original

25986213354_7fc7c4657f_o.jpg


After PP

re edit 72.jpg


Now i think i like the first one the most
 

Wolfsatz

Senior Member
Lol. When I saw "I am a PURIST" I heard my own voice in my head screaming that same thing 2 or 3 years ago when I got my first DSLR. Like you, I come from a film background (still shoot with my Olympus OM-2s!). So when I was told that photo manipulation was SOP with these digital cameras, I bristled at the idea. "That's cheating! You should be a good enough photographer that your pictures come out the way you want it without any editing at all!" Seriously, I was adamant about that.

Until I learned.

Consider this:

1. Pretty much all the great/professional film photographers of the past century and a half did post-process editing. You've heard of dodging and burning, right? Cropping? Those and many others were standard darkroom techniques for producing a desired result after they took their picture. So post processing is nothing new, not even to "purists" (Ansel Adams reportedly spent years processing "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" - arguably the most lauded photograph of all time - before releasing it. Check out the before and after.)

2. This was the argument that finally won me over. Modern camera sensors record insane amounts of data when you click the shutter button, but here's the thing: it doesn't necessarily show you a true record of what you saw when you bring up the picture on the LiveView screen, your phone, or a monitor. This is particularly true when you shoot RAW. What the camera shows you is kind of a desaturated version of Real Life, allowing you to then play with all the data it stored behind the scenes to make things either true to life, or enhanced.

Why would it do this? Primarily because your eye is a better camera than your camera. Think about it. We automatically white balance, to take just one example. You walk through a room with incandescent lighting and see a white wall, it looks white. Go to the next room with LED lights, and the white wall looks white to you there as well. Walk outside into bright sunlight and look at the snow. Looks white, right? We have AMAZING processors, far better than our cameras. Unless you perfectly dial in the white balance every time the light changes, the white you see in your picture probably won't look like the white you saw when framing the picture. Auto white balance has come a long way and does a great job overall, but even then it can still be fooled if the majority of the picture is either all white or all dark. And when that happens, the camera will under or over expose anything else in the frame. (Here's why.) If you don't compensate when you take the shot, you sure aren't going to have a "PURE!", true-to-life picture unless you post process. It's not cheating. It's compensating for your camera not being as good as your eye. Bring back details in the shadows that your eye saw, but your camera didn't show you! Color correct! Erase that smudge caused by a chunk of dust you didn't know was on your sensor!

BTW, if you shoot in JPEG you'll see your pictures out of camera actually look better than RAW. That's because your camera does some basic post processing in JPEG, making the picture look like what it thinks it should, given all the data it collected on the processor. That's right - even your camera isn't "pure", at least in that mode.

If you like taking pictures and leaving them the way the camera shows them to you, that is absolutely fine. I don't think anyone is gonna argue with you about a matter of personal taste, least of all me. Have a blast with it! I did for good number of months myself, and was quite happy. But seriously, don't think that processing your pictures is somehow "NOT PURE!". History, and technology, argue against that.

Besides, once you get into it, it's a helluva lot of fun. You really should try it - make a copy of your picture to process, then compare it to your OOC (Out Of Camera, ie. unprocessed) version. You will probably be surprised at how often you say, "Now THAT'S what I saw when I took the picture!" at the processed version.

To answer your question: I started with a very basic processor that came with my HP tower, but several months ago started a subscription to Lightroom, with PhotoShop and their cloud service bundled, 10 bucks a month. It's amazing.

Again, I'm not criticizing your choice at all, or your stance on photo purity. If that's the route you want to take, go for it! But if you're doing that because you think your camera is giving you the exact picture you saw in your viewfinder, I hope my information perhaps gives you something to think about. "Post processing" doesn't mean making things look artificial. To the contrary, it often means adjusting for the way DSLR's take and display data to make the shot look real again.

Hope this helped!

:)

I think this whole topic generates probably as much controversy as in WUS.. what is 'real' watch, automatic vs quartz... etc.

I'll summarize in as few bits as possible:

  • I do basic editing to compensate for the camera's shortcomings.
  • While everything you said above is true; it is also used to hide the photographer's shortcomings.
  • When I shoot, I do challenge my self and take in consideration: Frame, Composition, Light, Movement with the objective to avoid editing.
  • IMHO - Heavy editing to include chopping, deleting or adding elements to a photograph relates more to Graphic Design than Photography. and not far from these ( everything here is manufactured and manipulated 001011021010101s 'fake')

20180113162727 by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
20180107021451 by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

20171119022425 by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
20171024213258 by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

20171029011840 by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

To Illustrate my point... My eye saw this colours (These were taking with the Bird Scene which focuses exactly on the center:
Chip by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Hands off the Goodies by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

New Kids by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Newbie by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

However, the same setting struggles with harsh lighting conditions (lack of proper light and proper contrast) Pretty dark shot.. but there was still plenty of light

Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

This is Wolf's School Room
Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Untitled by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

I phone Shotsin Portrait Mode minutes before sunset:
Sunset by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Ligh Conditions by Wolfsatz, on Flickr

Sunset by Wolfsatz, on Flickr
 
Last edited:

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
I understand all the points you made, and you'll get no argument from me about any of them. The great thing about hobby photography is that it's an artistic pursuit where you get to pick the rules. I was just throwing out my own thoughts, but by no means are they admonishments.

I actually enjoy those car pics. For what they are, they are very well done. I can see where someone who's taste runs decidedly towards "if it's fake, it's wrong" will take exception to them. But that sort of digital manipulation is becoming more and more the norm in product photography, adverts, etc., and if a professional does not want to cut him/herself off from that particular revenue stream it would probably behoove them to get good at it. The rest of us, though, can stick to our pedantic guns :)

LOL! Yeah, horophiles can certainly be a rather opinionated buch, you're right. Funny story: I got into watches in 2016 when my wife gave me a Movado Museum Classic in steel for our 15th wedding anniversary. Up until then all I had was 20 dollar beaters, and a G-Shock that I (still) use for work where I have to know the exact time to the second. That Movado was SO much more beautiful than the junk I'd been wearing that I was hooked, and wanted to learn more about higher end watches. So I immediately joined a watch forum (not WuS)...and they tore me to shreds! I think the first comment I got was, "Your wife must really hate you." Bwahahahaa! It was brutal, and I was really confused. Of course, after learning more about the hobby I understood their disdain. I've now got mechanicals, and a few other quartz, but I still love that Movado if only because my wife got it for me, and because it was my gateway into the hobby. Plus...it really does look good with a black suit and white shirt. (But please don't tell anyone at WuS I said that! ;) )
 

mikew_RIP

Senior Member
This is one of the best forums for understanding photography results are not a one size fits all, many years ago we had a member who took it upon himself to educate nearly every forum member as to how an image should be when finished,you notice i said used to have a member :D
 

Wolfsatz

Senior Member
Interesting... plenty of those at WUS to tell you what a real watch is and why you should not wear. Brand x, y, or z.

In the wisdom words of my beloved grand father... they can tell me how to shoot or wear when they pay for my cameras!




Sent from my Cyberspace Central Command
 
Top