F300EXR – Review Part 20 – Birds and Planes

I’ve been trying for two days to successfully shoot a bake off between the F300 and the D700 (yesterday) and the F70 (today) … I have finally achieved some sort of lighting parity in today’s tests, which you will not see in this part of the review :-)

Bait and switch … I like it. Well, technically it is not bait and switch … I just wanted to set the tone for the pain I have been feeling with the film modes … the icon for the ASTIA film mode is “S” … which to me screams STANDARD, which is what Fuji sometimes calls PROVIA. I;m getting pretty sick of the incompetence in Fuji’s software and user interface design people … I shot the first hundred or so images today with the two camera’s in different film modes. Scrap it all …

Anyway … so here are some images that came out of ASTIA-gate … this part will concentrate on birds and planes … I went a little nuts with it today.

A little private jet blasting overhead on its way to the airport. Shot in M4:3 at +2/3EV … but ASTIA made sure you can’t see the bottom anyway :-)

Now, I cheated a bit here … the background pole and bird have been softened using the blur brush in CS5. This is the perfect use for something like that … by the way, this is a pretty heavy crop from an L4:3 image … yes, I have been trying it for a while … all I can say is that distant objects have their edges ravaged really badly … but this bird was close enough to escape that ignominy …

There were a large number of shit-hawks, er, gulls near the restaurant where I had breakfast this morning. The puddles attracted a bunch of them for bathing and drinking (yuck) … the sun made it a challenge to capture them, especially with ASTIA on board.

The F300EXR is capable of some pretty magnificent detail on close subjects … I hope that you’ve been clicking through …

My only gripe with these EXR cams is that sharpening is a tad high … there are sometimes halos already in the image …

I was standing right in the middle of the gulls … and some of them were downright annoyed …

Backlit birds were much harder to process … Topaz Adjust gives me a hand here …

 

I was fooling around with L4:3 and happened to have focused on the light standard there just as this bird took off … although not perfectly sharp, it’s pretty neat …

Here’s what I meant about shooting distant subjects with L4:3 … and here in soft light (sun behind clouds for a moment) … the results are underwhelming …

Here’s a 100% crop from yesterday … the D700 … and yes, this is not all that impressive … those of you who really hate dSLRs can use this as your latest reason :-)

And the F300’s 100% crop from yesterday …

And one more from the F300 …

So … getting close is the key with most small sensors. Keep the details reasonably large and the camera will reward you with a great image. In this case, I am very pleased with the Gull images … but of course I was right on top of the little buggers … and they were ticked …