Blackbucks in Rut

[Aditya Panda]

With the monsoons comes the rutting and mating season of blackbucks. The does form enormous herds and the bucks spend almost all their waking hours rutting and fighting- often until death- over their territories and harems. The brute force with which they crash their heads together is something that will never cease to awe me. I truly wonder how they manage to survive without cracking each other's skulls! I've noticed that their spiral horns often get locked with each other- a real deadlock!

EXIF Details:

PENTAX K 10D
PENTAX SMC DA* 300mmF4 ED(IF) SDM
Shooting Mode: TAv
Tv: 1/1000 sec
Av: f/8
Ev: -0.3
ISO 400

Hate mid-day light!

Cheers,
Aditya

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Fine action. You got the shutter speed right to get them sharp. I am tempted to take off a bit from the top of the frame. Not many people know about this place.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Aditya Panda]

Yeah, I set the shutter speed and aperture manually to get both speed and depth. I let the camera do the metering and get the exposure right by setting the ISO by itself.

Yeah, the tree line in the top of the image does distract a bit.

Wish I could've used a polariser filter to tame that noon light.

Regards,
Aditya

[Ashvary Jain]

very nice shot...loved the action...

[Bibhav Behera]

Nice image... But why the noise?

[Aditya Panda]

Nice image... But why the noise?

Thanks Bibhav.

I agree about the noise, but I can't figure out why its there. ISO 400 is usually very clean from the K 10D. Even with ISO 800, I never have to run noise reduction on my images- certainly not for web usage at least. I didn't overdo sharpening in post processing either. I think the reason could be the TAv mode. I selected an aperture of f/8 and a shutter speed of 1/1000 sec. The camera then adjusted the exposure purely by adjusting ISO. The resulting image was a bit underexposed. Underexposure and high ISO aren't the best of friends! TAv is a pretty useful mode. Don't know why I hadn't used it a lot until now. Just need to be careful about the contrast between aperture and shutter. To top it all, it was terrible, terrible lighting. Harsh afternoon light :-(

In this case, I think if I had chosen a shutter speed of 1/800 or 1/640 at the same aperture, I could have still gotten the depth, the action and better exposure at lower ISO with less noise.



Cheers,
Aditya

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Aditya,
What do you mean by Contrast between aprerture and shutter?

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Aditya Panda]

Aditya,
What do you mean by Contrast between aprerture and shutter?

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

I used the word 'contrast' for the lack of a better word in my vocabulary at the point. Sorry, its confusing!

I meant the difference between the aperture and shutter values. Yes, difference would've been a better word. I meant to say that if at f/8 I selected a shutter speed of 1/1000 or may be 1/2000 and then let the camera set the ISO, I'd still get an underexposed image. Had I set it to a lower shutter speed of 1/800 or 1/640 sec, the exposure would've been more correct because getting exposure right purely on the basis of ISO is bound to have certain limitations. Correcting an underexposed image in post processing will again add to the noise problem.

Cheers,
Aditya

[Chitrita Chatterjee]

Brilliant......

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Aditya,

The new canon cameras also have auto ISO. The ISO is increased depending upon the situation. However, I don't know why it would underexpose the scene.

To start with it might be a metering issue. If you provide the correct expsoure compensation, then I think it should be ok.

Pulling up the exposure later will increase the noise in the shadows. Please check this link:
http://www.indiawilds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2006