Getting the BEST Image Quality with ANY GEAR!

hi guys welcome to the channel nothing is more frustrating than being out all day thinking we've taken some fantastic images only to come home back to the computer and realize there's just something not quite right about the images and the image quality is just not there so that's why i want to look into image quality today and what steps you can take to ensure that you take images with fantastic quality every time let's talk about one of the most important aspects of photography the light i'm not so much talking about great light bad light what's good light what's bad light because i think that's kind of an overrided term i think what's important to know when it comes to light is what kind of light portrays my subject the best way a lot of my best images i've taken in pretty poor pretty dark conditions with high iso if you're doing the right editing process you can turn some images taken in pretty awful conditions into fantastic final images in my opinion the only really bad kind of light is too harsh sunlight where the sun is just too high up in the sky you're getting a lot of heat on the ground you're getting heat haze you're getting a lot of unpleasant shadows on your subjects that's really the only light that i personally consider as bad light with the sunlight i feel like the sun is kind of your creative director which can be great but at the same time i really enjoy cloudy conditions because i can really take over the creative control of my images for instance i can expose them quite bright and then just darken down the bird keeping the background a bit lighter or the colors are quite dull so i can then set you at the colors i want and leave the colors that i don't want quite dull so i really enjoy that greater creative process i get when shooting cloudy conditions and also just the non-directional light allows me to easily walk around find the best angle for the bird so if i'm photographing in a rainforest i would prefer cloudy conditions because it will give me more even light and i don't have to deal with that mottled shadowy light with dark spots and bright spots if i'm photographing ducks on a lake or shorebirds on a beach or birds flying against the sky i want sunny conditions simply because we need that blue reflection of the sky in the water so everything looks quite nice if we don't get that these images just look dark and dull and gray and that's really the one time i think you need nice and not too harsh sunlight to get fantastic images if i'm photographing a bird with a very tricky plumage like really bright areas really dark areas oftentimes cloudy conditions will help me with my exposure so knowing your subject and knowing what light makes it look the best is one important step forward into getting your image quality to the maximum the two more interesting things when it comes to the light first of all very low sunlight i talked about it in my video about sharpness already that color cars of very strong very low sunlight can actually make your images look quite strange sometimes you just want to clean that up in the editing process to get much crisper sharper looking images the last thing i want to talk about when it comes to light is heat haze it's one of the main culprits in ruining people's images heaters is just a change in temperature of water evaporating off the ground and they're just messing with your images because there's all these like wobbly airwaves between you and the bird so he taste is one of those things there's nothing you can do and if you see it affecting your images you unfortunately usually have to pack up and wait for better day let's talk about image quality killer number two distance nothing ruins your folders more than being too far away from your subject and then cropping in a lot almost all the time when people complain to me that the image quality isn't right the images are not sharp the colors are not right they're quite noisy it's usually because they're photographed a subject very small in the frame and then cropped in really heavily to have it showing big in the frame afterwards and all that does is really to amplify all the problems that are already existing in your image so if you crop a lot you have more noise your sharpness suffers and overall the image quality is just not quite there so what can you do in situations when the subject is just too far away from you i would usually try to find a way to incorporate a subject in like a larger scene or as part of the landscape what i would not do is when i'm too far away slap on a two times extender or just shoot and crop i would either try to get closer or deal with what i've been given and try to create a scene where the bird or the subject is part of the whole scene and you can actually create a nice pleasant image without having to crop too much another mistake i see people making and that heavily affects image quality is to under expose your images too much when i started out in photography i was always quite scared of blowing any sort of highlight on my image so i often ended up underexposing one two three stops ending up with really dark images but i made sure i maintained like the last little detail in the slightest brightest feather that obviously led to very noisy images when i actually had to then increase the brightness on the computer and even with the camera with the r5 where you can do this a lot more there is still a big difference between shooting properly exposed or underexposing and then lifting the image that inevitably just leads to more noise and we really don't want that in our images so exposing nice and bright all the way to the right will always yield you better image quality and better results so watching your exposure watching your histogram and making sure there's not a big big gap on the right hand side of your histogram will definitely yield you better results and better images when it comes to the settings i would make sure that i actually know what i'm doing and that the settings that i'm using make sense for the scene that i'm photographing in so if you're photographing a bird that just sitting there not moving at all or like a landscape you will be able to get away with lower eyes or lower shutter speeds and still maintain a nice and bright histogram and overall good image but when you're shooting a bird that's hopping around in a dark rainforest you will need sufficient shutter speed and sufficiently high iso to freeze that movement at maybe 500th of a second or 640th of a second i often say getting your exposure right and knowing how the histogram works and what a good histogram should look like it's a lot more important than whether you're shooting manual full manual manual with auto iso aperture priority or even shutter priority none of these things really matter oftentimes it's best to just use what comes most natural to you let's talk about iso for a little bit because we all know the lower the noise in the images the better the image quality but i've also been saying in a lot of my last videos that you can fairly easily use very high iso and still end up with good image quality so how does that go together low iso being the best and me advocating for using higher iso i think in the end iso is just a tool to get you what you need in the field so personally i'm quite happy to push that quite far because there are a lot of programs available now that help me deal with the iso later on the computer and if you have a good workflow like i show you in my master class it's not a problem to deal with noise and the editing of the images afterwards where i think it becomes problematic is if you prioritize low iso and image quality over shutter speed i think that's a recipe for disaster and you will likely get into a moment where you miss the shot of a lifetime potentially in the past i was very hesitant to shoot above ice or 400 for instance what happened i was on a lake one day i had these eurasian spoon builds fishing right in front of me one of them was catching a massive carp and i had a 3 20th of a second in shutter speed at the time i thought oh great lois oh i get great shots shooting away i get home to the computer almost all the shots were just blurry and i just had no good images from a fantastic scene that was happening in front of me and that really taught me a valuable lesson that a noisy image that sharp is much better than a blurry image that has low eyes up now i want to share with you one of my top tips that i've learned over the years and that is if you use nice bright backgrounds noise is almost not an issue at all in your images shooting with lighter backgrounds is simply much easier and allows me to use higher iso without the noise showing having a light background actually allows me to have faster shutter speed use higher eyezols and the noise is actually not showing up because the light background simply doesn't show the noise if i was shooting the same bird with a dark background it would be harder to expose the image properly and it would show a lot more noise so ideally what i try to do is find a background that has a similar brightness a similar not a similar color but a complementary color to my bird and if i find that i can shoot at high iso with fast enough shutter speeds and get an almost noise free image even at iso 3200 6400 so even in dark conditions i try to always find a nice bright patch in my background and use that as my background because i can have higher shutter speeds and less noise in my images and just get much better images overall so this is definitely something to remember the brighter your background the less noise it will show and the darker the more dark dark green the background is the more noise will show for instance iso 6400 on a bright background will look less noisy than iso 1600 on a dark green background talking about backgrounds that's actually one of the elements that can heavily influence your images and also your image quality because a great background can perfectly complement your image and create much nicer to looking more higher image quality and a bad background can be pretty distracting and just contract from the oval image and make the image appear to have a lower quality whether you like it completely blurry or showing some of the habitat in the background or showing a lot of the habitat it doesn't really matter what i think is important that you actually consciously think about your background and then make a concerted effort to get the best possible background for your scene what can also greatly enhance your image quality and overall feel of your images is to create a great sense of intimacy with your images and how can you do that for instance what's really important is eye contact it's not very intimate if i'm just looking away from the camera talking at a different camera but if i'm actually turning and then looking right into the lens and talking to you now we get a much closer much more intimate feel and you feel like i'm just talking directly to you whereas if i'm looking at the other camera far away or might even look that way and i'm small in the frame it's not a very pleasant intimate image so we want that direct eye contact and the closer the better quite often to create that really intimate feel with your subject eye contact is the first part the other part is also trying to be level with your subject you don't really want to be shooting up or really down you want to create the feel that you're on the same level with your subjects so having that eye contact and being level with the bird goes a great length towards giving you good image quality and a really good overall feel in your images another very important aspect of image quality is sharpness i made a whole video about sharpness you can check that out and talk about sharpness in great detail and how can you achieve sharpness and a lot of steps that will help you to take sharper images so i don't want to go into too great detail today but there's a few important factors that i want to mention the first one i already mentioned use high enough iso so you have fast enough shutter speeds that's really the key of everything if your shutter speed is too low you will just end up with blurry images and that's no good is it there are two things that you can do instantly to improve image quality and sharpness and the first one is dump your uv filter i know camera stores love to give it to you as a little upsell for like an extra 50 or 100 dollars but these filters generally have worse image quality and give you less sharp images so why use them i know some people say if you drop your lens right on the filter maybe only the filter breaks but is it really worth it to save your lens that you might never drop but in return get bad images the whole time you're using the lens well at least for me it's not and after my video about sharpness there was a lot of people in the comments that took their uv filters off and instantly got better and sharper images so i think it's really something to think about and secondly what also helps your image quality is to stop down and not shoot wide open all the time a lot of lenses especially cheaper zoom lenses for instance like a tamron 150 to 600 millimeter lens it's wide open at 6.3 will be significantly sharper at like f 8 or f 9 when stopped down a little bit so i think that's really important that you stop down with these lenses and also when you're using extenders it's definitely beneficial to stop down one stop for instance if you have an f4 lens with a 1.4 extender that's wide open at f 5.6 stopping down to f 8 will increase sharpness and will give you better overall images when we talk about sharpness we may as well also quickly talk about depth of field because that's another important factor that can at least influence the perceived image quality of your image if you have an image with very shallow depth of field it might actually not look like the image quality is there because only a small part of the bird might be in focus for instance the belly in the feet and part of the neck might already not be in focus if the birds quite close to you and you're shooting wide open so while you can shoot wide open as a creative tool i would always try to make sure that if i'm shooting a bird on a nice perch for instance to have as much of the bird and the perch in focus simply because the image will appear sharper and the overall image quality will usually be better let's talk about image editing because in the digital workflow it has become such an important part in getting the best final images great raw files and great field technique are one important factor but you also need to know what you're doing when it comes to editing your raw files on the computer these days it's actually quite easy to transform a dull and noisy image into a great looking final image for instance this mallee ring neck behind me we took it on a dark dull day after sunset i saw 12 800 so the raw file was pretty dull pretty dark but i ran into dxo pure raw used one of my pro sets edited just like i show you in my master class and actually was able to transform the raw file into a really good looking final image that seems of much better image quality than the original raw file so if you want to learn all about my pro sets and how to get a great starting point in your raw processing and also my learn my photoshop workflow where i show you step by step how to master image editing make sure to check out my links down there in the description part of the things that i always talk about when i teach people photoshop is that you don't just want to learn how to process your raw files as you would do in lightroom but you also want to learn how to do certain things in photoshop like removing distracting elements that can really help you improve your images fix some imperfections in the birds plumage for instance and especially remove unwanted color casts from your images because that can give you much better much nicer overall feel and personally also find it important that i add enough nice saturation brightness and contrast to my images so they really stand out but even if you like a very neutral natural look in your images it's still important that you know how to edit your images and that you get to where you want to be another important factor when it comes to image quality is the gear you're using typically when it comes to cameras more expensive cameras and more expensive lenses also give you better overall image quality smoother looking backgrounds less noise and better overall sharpness i know in one of my last videos you weren't happy that i mentioned gear right at the beginning so i left it right towards the end this time and i think you can take fantastic images with all sorts of gear but generally speaking the more expensive more higher end gear will also yield you better overall image quality and sharpness so that's just something to keep in mind and i'm not saying it to brag about expensive gear or tell you you should buy more expensive gear no not at all but i think what's important when it comes to gear is to realize what sort of gear you're using and to keep your expectations in check because for instance this big 600 millimeter lens behind me will take much better much sharper images than even this fairly expensive 100 to 500 millimeter lens and if you compare to cheaper like 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens the difference will be night and day between those two lenses so when it comes to image quality and sharpness it's important that you also realize i'm using this in this kind of gear so this is probably the most i will actually be able to achieve and not be disappointed or not start comparing it to big 600 millimeter prime lens that cost 20 000 because you just can't compare the two if you follow all the steps that i try to teach you in this video today you will be able to take great images with great image quality with any kind of gear and lastly i want to talk about something that's not just true for bird photography or image quality but photography in general and that's you have to know your subject so you can be at the right place at the right time for instance with this region parrot in the background there i had to know where the birds are what their behaviors set up in the right spot and then wait to get this image the same is true for landscape images for instance there might only be a certain day of the year where the sun rises in the perfect spot to get that perfect looking image so you'll have to do some research find out when that day is and then be there to get that shot i hope you guys enjoyed this video and that it will allow you to take your image quality to the next level let me know in the comments what were the main obstacles that you've been facing when it comes to achieving great image quality also make sure to check out my brand new process and master class down there in the description because i know that will help your editing process tremendously other than that please make sure to subscribe to my channel give me thumbs up and i will see you guys in one of my next videos bye

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 43,917

Keywords: bird photography, jan wegener, birding, equipment, exposure, manual mode, aperture, depth of field, wildlife photography, nature photography, bird photography equipment, bird photography gear, Canon EOS R5, animal eye autofocus, R5, canon mirrorless, RF 100-500, Canon RF 100-500 L IS, Sony A1, blurry images, take sharp images, sharper images, sharpness, ISO, Noise, noise reduction, high iso, shutter speed, image quality, better image quality, improve image quality, Pure RAW

Id: fewH8hlTuMk

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021