Springtime Greylag Geese: 8fps Tracking and a Rendezvous

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The discussion centers on the practice of capturing high-speed images of greylag geese in flight, specifically focusing on an 8 frames per second (fps) tracking technique. The photographer notes the challenges faced, such as the left goose being partially obscured and the limitations of camera settings, particularly the high ISO of 3200 that resulted in increased noise. The use of noise reduction techniques is discussed, highlighting the trade-off between reducing noise and maintaining image texture. The conversation also touches on the differences between camera models, particularly the EOS 7D and EOS 550D, emphasizing the superior autofocus and predictive capabilities of the 7D, which enhance the ability to capture fast-moving subjects. The importance of understanding hardware and practicing with moving objects is noted, as well as the inherent advantages and disadvantages of different sensor types, particularly CMOS versus CCD sensors. Overall, the discussion reflects on the complexities of wildlife photography and the continuous learning process involved.
Andre
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So today I practiced 8fps (frames per second) tracking on a local greylag geese colony. Then you get this:

j6u4hi.jpg


I guess from the shift in the background you could estimate the take off speed of this formation flight. The total series is 12 frames in RAW + small jpg then the buffer was full.

Unfiortunately because the left goose was also the "bravo" in the formation, he is partly shielded off in most frames. The only real keeper is the fifth frame (the second frame is not tack sharp):

141ph0p.jpg


Spring is a bit early here:

25rhukk.jpg


while at the other side of the pond, I saw a rendezvous in the flowers:

vr97pd.jpg
 
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Very nice :smile:!
 
Thanks Andy and Lisa,

Well maybe to share some more. I did that series of the geese in take off in manual mode but with ISO in auto. That way I could select the aperture one click closed (F6.0), to improve it's sharpness, getting closer to the sweet spot, which is pretty important at max zoom 300mm. And I could get a reasonable short shutter speed, freezing the action (1/750 s). This way the ISO would adjust for a correct exposure. However I made those settings earlier in a somewhat brighter setting, and that would give me ISO 200-800. As it turned out however, this series was shot with the sun out and I got ISO 3200 instead.

The problem with that is noise. The signal to noise ration decreases under sensitive ISO settings and the result is shown in the upper frame here, with a 100% crop (RAW unadjusted for anything).

The lower frame shows what noise reduction does, I tried several settings with DPP manually for chroma and luminance noise reduction and ended up with both on 6 out of 20 increments. which is quite different from the default setting.

However you can also clearly see the loss of texture caused by the noise reduction, especially in the goose's cheek.

Ah well Photography is always a game of finding the best compromise.

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Those are beautiful! I like the bees too. Little E really just focused in on her first bee-watching experience two days ago, when a large bumblebee was checking out a bush outside our front window. She liked that it would dart around and then hover, and then dart around more. Once it put its legs down and looked like it would land, but decided not to do so.
 
Nice, yes nature is waking up rapidly

Anyway I went back today, beautiful weather and captured several air movements. The next sequence explains partly a bit why the EOS 7D is roughly twice as expensive than the EOS 550D

All shots are in a 8 frame pes second sequence, 25% of the small jpg output, the inserted crops are 100% size of the small jpg, but on the raw files they are double that size:

[PLAIN]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22026080/focus-1.jpg

The 7D not only focusses incredibly fast but it also predicts where the moving subject will be at the moment the frame is taken and it even does that in memory mode when the subject is moving out of the sensor area in the center as can be seen on the last pic.
 
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Anyway some of todays catch, after raw processing,. reduced to 25% and then cropped.

2crozmp.jpg


auz48j.jpg


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Those pictures are killer. Andre, how long did it take you to learn how to take pictures like that? I'm still figuring out how to use my FZ-40.
 
Topher925 said:
Those pictures are killer. Andre, how long did it take you to learn how to take pictures like that? I'm still figuring out how to use my FZ-40.

By practicing tracking of moving objects, I guess and knowing the hardware. Birds in flight (BIF) also requires hardware that is up to that. And thrashing some 200 pictures of the 220 I shot in that hour, keeping only the best.

The FZ-40 is a fine camera, outzooming my set considerably, I know it's early predessessors, the FZ-8 and FZ-18, but the lack of speed in focussing and frame repetition frequency makes getting results like this a bit hard.

There is a lot to tell about advantages and disadvantages of small sensor as the FZ-40, easy zoom optics is a positive, noise is a negative. Also interesting is the type of sensors. I believe that most SLR sensors are CMOS type, whereas most small sensor camera's use CCD's. CMOS gives a digital output instead of analog of the CCD, which is making the system much quicker. And it seems that the more pixels the system gets, the longer it takes for the CCD systems to digitize the output. But the individual pixel processing of the CMOS also seems to generate more noise, not something you would want with already noise sensitive small sensors.
 

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