Invested in LR5 earlier in the week.


Here is a squirrel I saw out my bedroom window a little while ago. I grabbed the camera and put on the 70-200 f4.


Hand-held, unedited raw converted to jpeg, @200mm





first attempt, cropped and a little tweaking.



a little too much hue, but what the hey.

I think this is going to be fun.

Best,

GWB

Beautiful!

now aren't ya glad ya did ;-)

You betcha!

I've always enjoyed learning new stuff, and I've a lot to learn.

Thanks for the encouragement guys.

Best,

GWB

Jeff Schewe's books "The Digital Negative" and "The Digital Print" are great companions for Lightroom 5. They are written with Lightroom in mind and are pretty accessible.

Welcome to the "Light" side!

And you thought Coopers were expensive.

When you start selling them to buy more photography equipment keep me in mind.

drover

Looking at the cropped image, it is clear that the quality of the lens is really good!

I know about the digital tools to improve images, but they can only go so far and there is no substitute for a sharp lens at the start!

John

Lens is pretty good. However, it appears as though the focus point is on the thigh. Either that or the lens needs a fine tune to the camera. If you look about an inch and a half up from the fence on this thigh it appears that is more in focus than on the eye where it should be. Either that as the focus point from the shooter or the lens needs a fine tune. Easily accomplished if the camera allows it.

Yes, just a slight bit fuzzy. I don't know the actual distance, but going from the initial image one is asking quite a bit to get hairline focus with that degree of cropping.

In the past I used to run around with a point n shoot unit, and once in a while it would absolutely nail focus at considerable distance. This one was about 125 yds with a Nikon CoolPix
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I wish our present cameras still had the split ring focus point in the view finder like our older units. With my film units one could could milk the most from his lens. If I have time with today's cameras, I'll make them focus two or three times until I think they've hit their potential, but that takes time.

A brighter day with and potentially higher F stop might get one a bit more depth of field too. With critters though, one has to grab the moment, as they don't often stop and pose.

Agreed. The other this with NR or IS one has to let that settle a bit before releasing the shutter.

On the recent sheep hunt I used f/11, f/16 and f/22 primarily...
However, the lens I have (500mm) is sharpest at f/5.6. I did however get quite a few crisp images using the higher stops.

Clear blue, crisp skies and soft bright sun from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. are a wet dream anymore....

Great investment, I love Lightroom. Lots of youtube vids to show you tricks

I shoot Nikon's - everything from the old D40 to a D3s and I've found that when shooting scenes with a lot of contrast I rarely have a photo out of focus. For example if I'm shooting a soccer game and one of the teams has a bright uniform I get great images but if one of the team has a lot of blondes in white uniforms I'm in for a long day.

My wife tells me that the camera doesn't trust me to put the focus point on the target if there isn't a clear difference between the subject and what's around it.

DB: I think that is quite true regardless of camera brand. In the past we've had some serious issues with things like black bear or bison when one is in close. Even going for the eye, there not much separation in the focusing realm, and images often end up something short nailed.

A few years ago I thought I had about 30 excellent bear and cub images that were all dropped in the round file.

Shoot the head of a canadian goose and try to see feather detail...

The DSLR's are a amazing but even with the sensor technology there are still some pretty big challenges.

Not hard to tell when your hold or rest isn't rock steady or your shutter speed is slow...

One thing you can do though is use spot metering. That'll relieve some issues.

But that's good excuses to go shoot some more ;-)

I have a couple Nikon D200's and use Capture NX2 to convert RAW to jpegs once I'm through with tweaking a photo but I've just learned Nikon is no longer going to support their software in a month or so...not good news. So, Looks like I may have to resort to going to Lightroom instead-bummer. I hate change and really liked Capture NX2.

http://www.luminescentphoto.com/blo...x-d-the-end-of-capture-nx-as-we-know-it/

LR4 or 5 offers so much more than anything else I wouldn't fret. I only use the NX2 to move files from the card to the computer.

From what I understand when Nikon decides to stop support for CNX2 this summer there may come a time when NX2 won't function anymore...especially if you get another camera or OS. I need a computer upgrade from Vista to at least Windows7 so, don't know how that will work six months or so down the road.