MN wild turkey

[RainyEye]

new camera, new telephoto, new hobby. I wanted to share this, it's one of my favorites. Suggestions welcome.

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s286/GSCLARK918/IMGP0635.jpg

[Dbl]

A new K100D excellent choice (still a die hard Pentax fan). Its a nice photo. If I could make a suggestion you may want to shoot in Av not Tv mode with shots such as this. Being able to control your depth of field will give you consistently better results.

The snow is overexposed but there is not much you can do about that and still retain some shadow detail. Nice job and enjoy your new hobby!

[MN Shutterbug]

Nice shot. Very sharp. It looks like he's tip toeing thru the tulips. I agree with Dbl. If you narrow the depth of field, you would be able to isolate the subject from the background. Also, have you ever heard of "the rule of thirds"? When composing a shot, try and place the subject off center, in other words, 1/3 in from the left or right and 1/3 down from the top or up from the bottom. It makes for a more eye pleasing photo. With the turkey, you should have had more space in front of him. Otherwise, it looks like he's running out of the picture.

Keep shooting and sharing. I love seeing sharp wildlife shots. Also, you'll never stop learning. Enjoy.

[Steve Foss]

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If you narrow the depth of field, you would be able to isolate the subject from the background.

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I know what XT meant by narrowing the DOF, and he's right, but I just want to break it down a little bit in case it's info you don't know.

You widen the lens aperture (open it up, which shows by a smaller f-stop number) to get a shallow depth of focus and isolate the subject from its background. So at a wide f2.8 aperture opening, there's less in focus in front of and behind the subject than at a narrower f11 aperture, for example. Shooting "wide open" is shooting at the lens' largest aperture (smallest f-stop number). "Stopping down" means you narrow the aperture (larger f-stop number).

The rule of thirds is a good starting point. It's an excellent standard practice to master before deciding when to break it. And there are times to break it.

Hope that wasn't overkill. If you already knew all that, sorry.

I like this image a lot. And thanks for showing it to us, not to mention the future work of your new hobby. Congrats on the new gear!

[MARINERMAGNUM]

thats a beautiful image. the only additional suggestion i would make would be,if possible,to select a single af point,lock the focus on the head,and recompose. it always helps to have the head/eye in focus,but it's tough when the subject is moving and you don't want to miss the shot. thanks for sharing and have fun.

how did DBL know the camera/exif data?

[Dbl]

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how did DBL know the camera/exif data?

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Yep, I use a nifty little free Exif viewer called Opanda IExif. Told me it was shot in shutter priority and other interesting facts. This info is very valuable to all of us trying to improve our shooting.

[RainyEye]

Hey Guys, I really appreciate the constructive comments, I learned more from you in a short time compared to trying to figure out what the manual is suggesting! Thanks again!

[MARINERMAGNUM]

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Yep, I use a nifty little free Exif viewer called Opanda IExif. Told me it was shot in shutter priority and other interesting facts. This info is very valuable to all of us trying to improve our shooting.

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DBL,i downloaded it and it works fine. How is it possible to block the data if you want to keep it private? thanks.

[Steve Foss]

If you have a version of photoshop that offers "save for web" in the pulldown, that strips exif data so the image uses as little memory as possible. Both my CS and CS2 offer that, and I always use it. Not to hide anything, because there's really nothing to hide, but the less bandwidth that gets used on my Web site or on the sites we post, the better.

Otherwise, I don't know how else to keep exif private. No doubt there are ways.

[Dbl]

My only concern with using Photoshop to strip Exif data is that it does not have "lossless JPEG" operations, some degradation will occur. There are commercial plug ins for Photoshop to take care of that but I prefer another free program, IrfanView which will strip Exif with no harm to the JPEG. Actually there are a number of free programs out there, I just happen to use this one and also use it for resizing files for the web.

My web hosting also offers as an option to block Exif data if you chose to do so. Then you don't have to worry about removing it. Isn't this digital world just great? All the things you get to learn?

[Steve Foss]

Dan, I didn't know any jpeg could be saved in a lossless way, even at minimum compression (max quality) settings. If you post a couple of the names of those programs that you know (or just shoot me an e-mail if you'd rather), I'll certainly take it from there and dig them up and see if any of them work for me on Macs. And thanks for the heads-up!

[Dbl]

There are a few programs that now claim jpeg lossless. I haven't taken the time to verify any of them. I do know that CS is harsh in its "save as" command. Would we as the average viewer see the difference? I'm not sure we would, but if there is something out there that is better the discriminating view may notice the difference.

Here are a few programs I am aware of that are Mac compatible as well as Windows. I don't think many of them are claiming lossless saving but I haven't dug to deep to find out for sure.

ExiFutils

JPEG Cleaner

EXIF Tool

and a Photoshop plugin that is supposed to be good,

Better JPEG.

Some are shareware, some I think might be free and the plugin I believe might be commercial. Again I have had good luck with Irfan viewer but that is not Mac compatible.

[Steve Foss]

Thanks, Dan.

[MarchelRipley1]

Good work Dan, I appreciate your efforts.