First attempt at postings pics - Zoo photos FZ100- C&C welcome

[HMW12]

Hi Everyone
I'm a relative newbie with digital photography and have just gotten a camera that has full manual control. Here are some of my first attempts with this camera. These are SOOC - I have PSE 9 and Lightroom 3 to learn as well so have lots to keep me busy through the winter My immediate question would be do these need additional sharpening. Do you apply additional sharpending only if you want to print??




I know the polar bear needs the most work and the highlights are likely clipped - would appreciate some advice on the best approach on this one

Thanks

[acsky]

Hi Helen

Congrats for your new camera!

I like the second image better.

The polar bear looks out of focus to me.

Toño

[Mark von Kanel]

Hi Helen,

#1 might work with a tight crop to get rid of the log, # 2 works well nice capture, #3 looks out of focus im no post processing guru as im just learning as well but i dont think you will be able to correct this. Im sure one of the others will be able to verify this.

mark

[Geoff F]

For me, Helen, the first two are a fraction tight to the frame edge. I would prefer a little bit more space between the faces and frame. But only a little bit more. I tend to pull back a little when composing my shots then crop slightly.

This gives me a second chance to think about the exact positioning and sometimes allows me a bit of rotation room.

With the first one, that piece of wood in front of the lion's ear is a pity because it spoils what could have been a reasonable photo, but moving this piece of wood before shooting could cause other risks. The second one works much better.

Unfortunately the polar bear is too far out of focus to be recovered, as Tono and Mark mentioned. But what went wrong? The water appears sharper so did the camera wrongly auto focus or did the bear move and the shutter speed was too slow to cope with this.

With regard to your questions. White objects can be a real problem to expose correctly. Auto exposure usually works well but it can be fooled into over exposure, particularly if the white area is rather small.

Spot metering on bright areas sometimes helps and I often switch to manual settings after spot metering around a difficult scene. Alternatively using a bit of negative exposure compensation can avoid blown highlights.

But this often results in a dark shot with greyish whites. However, if there is doubt about the highlight exposure setting I would sooner slightly under expose and recover brightness during editing than risk over exposure.

Once highlights are blown the fine details are lost forever; they cannot be recovered even if the area is subsequently darkened.

Is your camera set to automatically add sharpening? Personally, I prefer to set these options to zero then do all the sharpening manually, to suit each scene, while editing each image. Raw files are unsharpened when shot.

Virtually all digital images will need a bit of sharpening, unless they are excessively auto sharpened at the point of shooting; which can be too much.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Helen,

Welcome to the CiC forums from me and congrats on the camera.

My immediate question would be do these need additional sharpening?

Yes, usually.
The trouble is there are so many variables that come into play and what's right for you hosting images at Flickr isn't necessarily right for others hosting elsewhere, even then it depends whether the 1024 version we see here is one produced by Flickr, or if that's the exact size you uploaded.

Do you apply additional sharpending only if you want to print??

No.

I know the polar bear needs the most work and the highlights are likely clipped - would appreciate some advice on the best approach on this one

It is probably mis-focused and it has motion blur, unfortunately I cannot see EXIF data to confirm the shutter speed.

Are you shooting RAW?
You really need to in order to get the best quality and ability to recover detail in whites that are just 'over exposed'.

In LR, on the Basics tab (of RAW converter), start at the top and work downwards is a fairly good method.
Hopefully others with LR experience will be along to assist further.

#1 is good, would benefit from selective sharpening.
#2 is just great as it stands, very well done

Cheers,

[HMW12]

Thanks everyone for taking the time to comment on these. I do have raw versions of these but just posted the jpeg to flickr.


For the polar bear - yes she was moving doing laps of the enclosure and a bit of a rise out of the water and backflip before starting over - that was what I was trying to capture. I was also shooting through glass and trying out a polarizer for the first time as well - why make life easy . I had set the max iso to 100 so the shutter speed was probably too slow and I do think the camera had abit of trouble autofocusing.

Geoff - thanks for the suggestion to pull back abit - I understand what you mean - a fine balance between filling the frame and overfilling the frame. And I will definately remeber to try some exposure bracketing. I went abit snap happy rather than taking the time to carefully review and adjust the settings at the time. Sometimes less is more.

For the first picture I myself was of two minds because of the log yet I do find when I view if as a screen saver that somehow the log helps draw attention to the right eye.

Thanks again eveyone for your help and suggestions.

Helen