4am and ISO 25,600
One of the best places in England to photograph Ospreys is at Horn Mill trout farm in Rutland. The Osprey is a magnificent large brown and white fish-catching raptor with an impressive 180cm wingspan. Observing these birds catch fish is special.
The farm is a few miles from Rutland Water where the Ospreys were re-introduced to England from Scotland after being persecuted to extinction in the 19th century. This programme started over 20 years ago and has been successful in re-establishing this beautiful fish catcher to England. It didn’t take long for the Ospreys to find the trout farm, and its ponds were visited so regularly it was impacting business.
To prevent loss of fish the ponds were netted, apart from one left open for the Ospreys. A photography hide was installed, and this provides an excellent opportunity for close-up observation and photography of these majestic birds of prey.
I have visited may times and have captured some great action shots. Only once I’ve experienced a ‘no show’ during a 5-hour session. The other times at least one visit and sometimes 2 or 3 visits have taken place. And that is what makes it so interesting – you have to be patient and alert, as a dive for trout is over in a matter of seconds. Get it right and you can get some wonderful photos, fumble and you’ve missed it.
So, late last month I got up at 01:45 on a Sunday morning and drove 100 miles to the farm, ready to be in the hide before dawn in anticipation of one or more Ospreys visiting for a breakfast catch. Google told me sunrise would be 04:50. I settled into the hide and got ready: Nikon Z9 with the lightweight 300m f/4 PF. This allows for handholding through the mesh when action takes place. A tripod would be too cumbersome. Action can take place between 5 to 15 meters away as the hide is built right into the bank of the pond stocked with 1,000 trouts! The Z9 is ideal due to is 20 fps raw file shooting speed, excellent autofocus and large number of pixels for cropping if the action is at the far side of the pond.
I’d just about got my gear ready and the action started. It was 04:32 and the light was pre-dawn gloomy. 5 seconds later it was over – the Osprey caught a trout and flew off. I sat back and cursed the lack of light, when it happened again … at 04:39 a second Osprey dived in and caught a trout. A few seconds later it was gone with its catch. And that was it … as the sun rose, and light improved there was no more action. I watched my camera meter and repeatedly reduced the ISO as the morning emerged … but no more Ospreys paid the pond a visit.
I did manage to capture these pre-dawn action sequences of both Osprey dives, but only at ISO 25,600. I had the aperture wide open at f/4, and a marginal action / bird in flight shutter speed of 1/640s for the first dive and 1/800s for the second Osprey. Even at these settings the camera’s meter suggested I was underexposing by 1/1.3 EV. It tells you all you need to know about the very poor light. Reviewing the sequences, the shutter speed was too slow, particularly for the second bird which took off directly towards me, a few in the sequence are soft. Impressively, though, the Z9 had no problem focusing in these condition.
So did I get any useful shots? Below is one shot from the first dive. Not too shabby at ISO 25,600! The bird obliged by flying across me allowing me to pan and get a sharp shot at 1/640s. Normally I would want to use 1/1600s or 1/2500s for such action.
4:32am - 1/640s, f4, ISO 25,600
And here is the RAW file straight out of the camera with no corrections (re-sampled to 1024 pixels at long end).
Unprocessed raw file
Cleary, these conditions required quite a bit of post-processing to eek out an acceptable image. The key steps are described below:
I used DXO Photolab 5 as the raw processor mainly because of its excellent DeepPRIME noise reduction feature. In PhotoLab I reduced highlights a little and increased shadows and midtones a tad, increased saturation a little, used default sharpening, but I applied rather aggressive noise reduction with DeepPRIME (setting 65)
Thereafter, I launched ColorEfex Pro and used the Detail Extractor and the White Neutraliser to draw out the detail as much as possible in the bird (both at default strength)
The ColorEfex Pro is great at bringing out detail, but I only wanted that in the bird, not for the background, as at this ISO level it just adds noise. So, I exported the PhotoLab version of the raw file (with the PhotoLab aggressive noise reduction) and the ColorEfex Pro version (with the detail extraction) as two separate TIFFs.
I loaded the two TIFFs into Affinity Photo as a Stack, and ungrouped this stack to get two layers. Using a selection of the Bird, I created another layer of the bird only.
Now I could do my final editing: Adjusting blacks, whites, shadows, highlights of the bird separately form the background, and using curves on the background layer to subtly darkening the background a little to make the bird stand out more.
4:32am - 1/640s, f4, ISO 25,600
A bit time consuming, but it was the difference of a day’s (very early morning’s) shoot coming up blank or at least getting a couple of acceptable results – particularly for use on screens. I am not sure a large-scale print would hold up too well. But, with modern cameras and the right post-processing approach high ISO does not need to be a reason to give up shooting.
Then again, next time, I hope those Ospreys sleep in and join me when the soft morning sun is shining and I can shoot f/4 and 1/2500s at ISO 720!
4:39am - 1/800s, f4, ISO 25,600