Cat’s Eyes
In darkness, cats eyes are able to function in approximately one-sixth of the light needed for human vision. The room was a little gloomy… so, in photographic terms, I reckon this is about f/4. And yes, he is beautiful.
Wolfie
Wolf spiders are members of the family Lycosidae, from the Ancient Greek word “λύκος” meaning “wolf”. They are robust and agile hunters with good eyesight. They live mostly solitary lives and hunt alone. Some are opportunistic hunters pouncing upon prey as they find it or even chasing it over short distances. Some will even wait for passing prey in or near the mouth of a burrow.
Wolf spiders resemble Nursery web spiders (family Pisauridae), but they carry their egg sacs by attaching them to their spinnerets (Pisauridae carry their egg sacs with their chelicerae and pedipalps). Two of the Wolf spider’s eight eyes are large and prominent, which distinguishes them from the Nursery web spiders whose eyes are all of approximately equal size.
Mmmmmoo Cow
Moo Cow, Fisheye, HDR and snoutage all in one shot. Life doesn’t get much better than that. I must stress I am not a fan of HDR normally, but it hasn’t half given this cow some mental definition. Don’t you just wanna tickle that snout?
Saltwood Church
Built by the Normans the oldest part of the present Saltwood Church dates from about 1100 and the tower, which originally had a gabled top, from about 1200.
D7000 Highest ISO Test (25,600)
One of the main reasons for buying the Nikon D7000 and semi-retiring the D200 was the massive advances made in noise control at high ISO settings. Whilst this camera is not in the same league as the FX (Full Frame) Nikons (D700, D3x etc), the D7000 does a pretty damn spiffing job. I wanted to see if ISO 25,600 on the Nikon D7000 could produce a useable image, or whether it was just there for show. I can confirm that, with a little work this photographer is pleased. This test is only concerned with producing images for web use – your mileage may well differ if you need to make some large prints.
The first shot is straight off the camera – just re-sized and cropped. The noise is clearly noticeable but at such a high ISO on a cropped sensor I still find this remarkable. The D200 doesn’t look this clean at ISO 1,600.
Whilst the results are already pretty spectacular in my opinion, I wanted to see how well Topaz DeNoise would cope with the image. The image below is the result of applying the standard preset ‘JPG Large Grain Severe Noise’ and telling the software to recover details. I then made a couple of colour tweaks in Photoshop CS3.
Whilst you will always lose some details with this aggressive level of noise reduction, I still think Domino looks pretty good. Good enough to make my blog anyway.
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