I took a brief walk at lunch today and perhaps 50 feet from my house I encountered a woodpecker destroying a dying tree. I was very impressed with his industrious hunt for food. And I had the two cameras so I shot a bazillion images. The woodpecker was inside the branches so there was dappled sunlight, but the image was backlit so I had to increase compensation by about a stop.
All in all, these were bad choices. It slowed the shutter and that added blur. All in all, the images sucked rather a lot.
Also, craning your neck upward is not conducive to sharp images. More blur on top of the slow shutter. I enjoyed shooting these few that survived, but processing them was a nightmare. Grain, blur, CA (for the S1) and I ended up deleting a lot of images …
Sigh …
I did get a decent image from the S1 right up front … and by decent I mean you can see a bit of detail and the pose is ok.
Here’s another from the S1 … it too shows some detail and the pose is decent. The background is not great, but what can you do? You shoot what is there …
The lone surviving HS50EXR image is pretty good too. But only at web size. You won’t see the originals for these as even these few suck.
But hey, I got to watch a woodpecker for quite a while and it was fun … that’s why we do this, no?
