2010-06-28

Cows! D700 Dynamic Range Example

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I uploaded this photo to my Picasa Web Album yesterday and it has received very friendly praise and comments in a relatively short time (thank you to all of my followers!). It also serves as a good example of how much of a "buffer" the D700 has in the shadows, dynamic range wise (to underline the claim that I made in a post a couple of weeks ago), and at which quality.


Cows chewing the cud (NIKON D700, 1/400s @ ISO 200; f/11, 12 mm (in 35mm)

As usual, when I made the photo I tried to not blow out the highlights, to be able to get back to what you can see above - in the final version, I brought down the blue luminance a good amount to make the difference between the clouds (or rather: vapor trail leftovers) and the skyblue bigger, and this wouldn't work with a blown out blue channel. Here's the unprocessed photo without any edits:

Cows chewing the cud (unprocessed) (NIKON D700, 1/400s @ ISO 200; f/11, 12 mm (in 35mm)

There's a good amount of noise in the brown areas of the cows' fur, but it doesn't matter for the web version, and it wouldn't matter for a 30x45cm print, either.

Needless to say that what I actually saw with my own eyes was more like the final, edited version! It was a bright and sunny day, the sun had just disappeared behind these trees, leaving this part of the Finsterbachalm in the shadows - but from the exposure settings you can see that it still was very bright and these cute cows where of course not in the dark like that. :)

PS: yes, that's the Sigma @ 12mm - did I mention it's barrels of fun? :D

5 comments:

  1. I put my Nikon 12-24mm DX lens on my D700 and was sad to see that it did what I had read would happen - that it would frame down to DX size - so to see what a fantastic shot you have made with the 12mm Sigma, opens up a whole new world.

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  2. David, you have to turn OFF the auto format in the shooting menu. You can use the 12-24DX from 17mm on on the D700 with minimal vignetting (and somewhat soft and fuzzy corners), from 19-20mm on with a filter.

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  3. So my question, how did you process it? It looks great! I try to process something like that and it ends up pretty crummy.

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  4. Hello Andy! I have brightened the darker areas with a combination of Fill Light and a graduated filter in Lightroom. You can see the graduated filter's effect "ending" just below the sky in the trees (I described using an "upside down graduated filter" to brighten darker areas in December).

    Other than that... I decreased the blue luminance to have the white hazy clouds stand out more from the sky. The rest is just minor tweaks.

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