With the ongoing storms and cloud cover, I have been going over some older photos using my new found skills in CS3. So, here we are, yet more birds…
Heron – WO 80mm ED II Triplet Apo.
Lorikeet – Sigma 55-200mm kit lens.
Butcher bird – Vixen 102mm F9 ED refractor with x0.67 Reducer.
All taken with Pentax *ist DS DSLR set to manual mode (focus & exposure). I find them fascinating creatures to observe through the camera viewfinder; very intelligent and almost human like, at times, in their behaviour!
In CS3, I have found the Raw File capability of reading the Pentax proprietary .PEF files to be very useful, where I can make various corrective adjustments.
Most of my (terrestrial) WO and Vixen 'scope photos are underexposed as the OTA’s are relatively slow (F7 and F9) compared to camera lenses and I need to keep the shutter speed up, around 1/250 sec minimum, to minimise camera shake caused by the mirror flipping up, even mounted on a sturdy tripod. 1/1000 sec would be much better!
The shadow/highlight adjustments and smart sharpening have made enormous improvements compared to my old techniques in Corel PhotoPaint, which could probably have achieved the same results but perhaps not as easily?
In Smart Sharpen, I set the Radius to 0.5 pixels and the Amount to between 100 and 250%.
Thanks for posting those pictures, Dennis. I love the Butcher Bird. For a few years we used to have a family nesting just over my back boundary in a mess of vines that used to live there. To listen to their singing in the morning was pure pleasure.
Regrettably the house and land on which the vines resided was sold and the new owners 'cleaned it up' - rotten sods. I haven't seen or heard them (the birds) since.
