PECKER PICS!!!! Photography in the RAW! Hey PEEPERS...You all have got to see this...

[Gato Moteado]

....OK, first get your minds out of the gutter. i'm talking about pixel peepers.

if you're a photographer, you should always be shooting in RAW. no not unclothed (though, that would be perfectly fine)....but saving RAW image files to your memory card. if you're gonna process your own images, and especially use AI noise reduction, it's much better to work with RAW files than already highly compressed JPGs.

OK, now that that is out of the way...let's get to the pecker pics...woodpeckers, of course. if you saw my post from yesterday, i got some decent shots of the woodpeckers making their nest in a dried cecropia tree just outside my door. well, today i used the tripod to lower the shutter speeds, in order to cut the ISO, and i got lucky with some nice diffused light for a short time. these shots were taken at ISO 320 and 280 respectively:





both shots were from the same distance....i just did a deeper crop on the first shot...although both are deep crops. but, to give you an idea of how much of a crop was done on the first image, here is the full size image straight out of the camera:



i did my normal processing with adobe cameraRAW, including the AI denoise and then passed the images to photoshop for minimal touch-up and to be saved as high res JPGs. now for the pixel peepers enjoyment....look at the pecker heads zoomed in at over 200%...i don't think i've ever produced images capable of this before.