Zoo - Tigers, Yay!!!! 56k warning!!!! 10 images

BoblyBill · Mar 2, 2009

I loved the tigers! They where playful and beautiful animals. Of course my favorite of all the tigers is a white tiger and he liked to hide in places that you couldn't take a lot of pictures of him, jerk.

CLICK ON PICS FOR HIGHER-RES

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Antarctican · Mar 2, 2009

Lovely shots of the big cat. My fave is #4 as you can see its eyes and markings, and the surroundings don't show that it's in captivity.

Looks from this thread and others that you had a very productive day at the zoo, with lots of good pics!

Overread · Mar 2, 2009

Great series of shots!
Like Anty I really like number 4 and I think (of the tigers) its your best shot!
It also great to see a content and sleepy look on the white tigers face as well as the look you captured in the last shot!

Out of interest some of the shots (like 8) look really great, but looking at the large size they appear softer - as if either you were pushing your lens past its best and/or cropping shots or you were just missing the focus in some - out of interest how were you focusing?

BoblyBill · Mar 2, 2009

I was shooting with a rented 70-200 f/2.8 with a 1.4 tele and had the camera on One Shot for most of the time because they weren't that active and on AI Servo it hunts back and forth a tiny bit little if the object was not moving because it's trying to predict movement I'm thinking. What I should have done is take two different set of pictures. One when they were laying around and have the camera on One Shot and then another set looking for them in motion putting the camera in AI Servo. Some also might be a little blury (like 8) for because of these reasons... I still don't have a good way a down sampling shots and they lose sharpness and I might have put a little to aggresive noise reduction on a couple, plus I think I was putting to much faith on IS when I know that really I should stay above 448 (200x1.6x1.4). Thanks for commenting guys!

Overread · Mar 2, 2009

IS is normally pretty good with preserving sharpness (dim cloudy UK and my hatred of high ISOs means I often find myself at very slow speeds 1/100 area which means I get a lot of blurred motion shots - but when they are still camera shake is not a worry)).
Also if you find your losing sharpness when resizing just run the sharpening again after resizing - I do that all the time (actually I use a 2 stage method - sharpen once at fullsize - downsize to 2000 pixels on the longest side and sharpen again - downsize to 1000pixels on the longest side and sharpen again - I generally find that the second sharpen I use simlar settings to the first - the third (and last) is normally only a very tiny amound (amount 20 area).

As for focusing I have found the best thing to be backbutton focusing - especailly with HSM lenses - set the camera to back button and then the focusing to AI servo - if the focusing starts playing up you just don't press the back button and use the manual focusing (no need to fiddle for the AFon/off switch either - just reach forward and turn the focusing wheel as normal). It also allows for easy off centre recomposing since you don't get AF comming on when you half depress the shutter