I took Omar and Ozzy on a quick road trip today for some nearby birding at Barr Lake State Park after work. On the way to the park, I spotted this Ferruginous Hawk on a pole and took a picture of it:
The focus was dead on and all sequential images came out tack sharp, as expected.
As we arrived to the park right at sunset, we found a deer, along with a killdeer roaming around the park :)
The killdeer shot was taken at ISO 2,800, 1/1600th of a second.
Right after sunset, I noticed some pheasants in the field:
There were at least 5-6 of them in one spot and as I approached closer with the car, they all flew away:
Normally, I do not try photographing birds with the D700 after sunset, because of lack of light. In this case, I cranked up the ISO to 12,800 and let the camera manage the ISO for me. The first image was shot at ISO 1,600 and the second one at ISO 1,800, both at 1/1250th of a second @ f/5.6 on Nikon 200-400mm f/4.0 + 1.4x TC.
While returning home, I noticed a large bird flying off to the side of the road. I thought it was a hawk, but I stopped to take a quick look. It was so dark that I could not tell what it was, until I heard a loud screech. After I realized that it was an owl, I decided to try out the D3s at a really high ISO. I cranked up the ISO to 25,600 and took a few shots of the owl:
When I looked at the camera LCD, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The camera was able to capture the bird in such a dark environment, that I could not correctly focus through either the viewfinder, or the liveview screen. The image is obviously out of focus and noisy, but it is still not bad at all. I ran one pass of noise reduction and resized the image and I’m very impressed with the results. Nikon D3s is truly one monster camera for low-light photography!
About Nasim Mansurov
!600, 1800, 2800 ISO, those are very nice. You now have me dreaming of owning a D3s…. The pheasant in flight is great.
Tom, thank you! Are you going to take advantage of the current rebates, or did you just decide on body-only for now?
Too bad the weather sucks outside…it would be nice to try out your Bigma on the D3s.
Beautiful stuff. Amazingly low (or NO) noise at high ISO.
Now I’m even more eager to get my paws on a D3S!
Matt, I’m sure you will love it! :)
can you illustrate a little bit what focus mode you set when taking the picture of the hawk? Thanks.
Honglet, I used spot metering with 21 point dynamic AF.
Насим, смотрю здорово отрабатывает D3S на достаточно высоких ИСО в полевых (реальных) условиях. На таком фокусном наверно штатив или монопод использовали?
Неа, все фотографировал вручную с машины :)
Да уж, это скорострельное ружье для ночной охоты рулит:). Вы кстати, предпочитаете использовать карты памяти какого объема? 8 Гб будет достаточно? А то я сейчас уже приглядываю 16-тигиговые с 675Х скоростью. Они правда стоят за 200. Есть ли смысл в скорострельности карт памяти или 300Х достаточно?
Алексей, не знаю как пропустил Ваше сообщение. На D3s у меня две карточки по 16 Гб, хотя две по 8 тоже работают неплохо. Я купил Sandisk Extreme Pro 16 GB – кажись они 600x…
I have Nikon D3000 camera and Sigma 150-500 mm lens. Can you look at some of my latest photos in http://www.flickr.com/photos/samkum43/ and tell me what i am doing wrong? How can i get more sharper pictures? Is it something to do with my Shutter speed/ISO settings , or this is because of the limitations with my camera and/or lens.
Thanks
Sampath
Sampath, can you send me a full-sized sample over email and tell me your settings? Need to understand everything to be able to tell you what’s wrong.
Hi Nasim,
I have been following you for a week now. I just bought my first DSLR (Nikon d3100), and starting to read and learn through your articles.
Quick question on the second picture of the pheasants. at f/5.6 , how did you get such depth of field? Isn’t that quite a large aperture?
correction: isn’t that a small aperture **
Yes, but depth of field heavily depends on the type of optics you use. If you shot with an ultra wide-angle lens, everything would appear sharp beyond several feet at f/5.6. It is a whole different story when you shoot with very long lenses…
So you used a wide angle lens, 200-400mm, but it isn’t sharp past the bird @ f/5.6 …
Ayan, 200-400mm is a super telephoto lens, not a wide-angle lens.