A Mountain Goat and More!

Image Critiques Weekly Challenge
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_AWD4405-Enhanced-NR.jpg2000Ă—1334 2.12 MB

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_AWD4405-Enhanced-NR-Edit.jpg2000Ă—1334 1.8 MB

Mountain Goat

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_AWD4405-Edit.jpg2000Ă—1334 2.78 MB

More!

Critique Style Requested: Standard

The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.

Description

I came across this scene on February 23rd around 4:00 at the end of Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. A lone mountain goat was high on the cliffs near Druid Peak. I set up my Canon R5, 600mm lens and tripod. In addition I added my 2x extender bringing my reach to 1200mm. I quickly focused in on the mountain goat and concluded that it was too far away to get a decent image of it. However, shortly after I was set up someone in the small crowd mentioned they thought there was a mountain lion on the cliff! I quickly learned the approximate location which was slightly to the left of the red colored rock. I could barely see the animal even when I did a full electronic zoom. Using my phone to trigger my shutter to minimize any vibration, I took several pictures all with the mountain goat in the center. In the image the mountain lion is surprisingly close to the goat. When I got home I used Google Earth to determine that the animals were approximately 1.1 miles away from where I was standing!

Image one is the uncropped view. Image two is a cropped version of the mountain goat. Image three is a cropped version of the mountain lion. The mountain lion is in the center of the image.

Specific Feedback

This example is probably much more about an experience I had at Yellowstone than it is about the actually images. However, I would love to hear any thoughts on how I could have achieved better quality images. I triggered the camera with my phone, lowered the ISO as much as I thought I could and keep the shutter speed high. I removed the camera hood as it was rather windy and I used Topaz AI to remove noise and sharpen the image. In addition I used Photoshop to upscale the image. I even tried averaging ten images after aligning them in Photoshop and that didn’t seem to help a lot. I wonder if there is some software or technique that astrophotographers use that might help me here.

Technical Details

Canon R5, tripod, 2X extender
Lens: Canon EF 600 L F/4.0
Settings: ISO 500, 1200mm, F/8.0, 1/1250sec
Raw images were processed in LR, PS, Topaz AI
All images were triggered with my phone.
(I upscaled the image in Photoshop and I tried averaging 10 images. These didn’t seem to help very much in improving the quality of the images).

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Quite the experience, with the Mtn Goat and Lion in the same frame. The lion is hard to find even in V3, because it blends in so well. There are several reasons why upscaling and averaging didn’t work. First, averaging in astro/night photography takes advantage of the fact that the dark noise in a photo appears at random. The physics of random noise mean that you get noise reduction as a function of the square root of the number of measurements. When you upscaled, you did not add random noise, so you get no benefit from averaging. Even if you used different methods of upscaling, the changes are not random, so you will not get any “noise” reduction. There’s a second fundamental physical principle that says you cannot add “information” once you’ve recorded an event, so upscaling only lets you make a larger print, it doesn’t improve the result.

1 Like
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Thank you for that @Mark_Seaver ! It makes perfect sense and explains why I have never seen a better quality image by upscaling.