Photographed on Grimsey Island in Iceland last week. I took up a personal challenge trying to photograph these Arctic terns before they hit the water - certainly a fun experience doing this - helped immensely with the new mirrorless Nikon Z9 , like its counterparts, locking on
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High ISO used - 4000
This one is processed using DXO Raw and LR.
Thoughts on DXO vs Topaz DeN vs Nik DFine vs other ?
This looks ridiculously hard to do - congrats on a super shot. The splash frames the action so well and I love the translucency of the bird’s feathers. Wow. Nicely done.
Great action shot, Karl! Excellent focus & detail (especially considering the crop). Catching them as they hit the water is quite a challenge as they flit about & dive so quickly. You caught this one perfectly! The only glitch is the overexposure on it’s tail but its pretty minor in light of everything else that went right.
I can’t compare to DXO because I haven’t used it. I tried ON1 NoNoise and Topaz Denoise and went with Topaz because at the time I’d get some really weird pink pixels just splashed all over some images. I didn’t try DXO because it did some extra things like lens correction with each use that you couldn’t turn off. So far my experience with Topaz has been fine although sometimes the software acts unpredictably - such as missing splotches of noise in some areas of a photo by using one mode and another mode cleans them up perfectly.
Wonderful action shot Karl. These guys are so fast that you almost need one of the newer cameras to capture them like this. I love the splashing water, the prey in the beak and even the lighting, while not soft, is certainly not harsh. So easy to blow the whites out on these and you did good to control that.
I have only used Topaz so I can’t compare but for the most part it works as intended. Sometimes it gets a little bit wonky so always zoom in and check details throughout your frame but I highly recommend it.