Jambo Kenya Baby

[Twisted]

Well I went to Kenya with work last week and bought myself a second hand Nikon D70s with a few lenses 55-200 and a 70-400 (I had an 18-50 but forgot to pack it) I also had a 2X zoom adapter but tbh it caused more hassle than it was worth because of having to use manual focus most of the time.

Anywhere heres some pics from an amature noob after taking about 1000 pics I've knocked it down to around 50 resonable ones.
links to the whole shebang
http://s563.photobucket.com/albums/ss79 ... ?start=all
I've also not shopped anything yet but I might do as some of the pics look a bit washed out and grey.

Heres some selections

For one of the days we went Hotair Ballooning over the Massi Mara which was ace


and just for scale








Anwyay I wont bore you with them all but feel free to take a gander and any advise on how to shop them to brighten them up would be appriciated

[Ronaldo]

How did you manage to take the picture of yourself in the balloon?

Nice pics mate, will look at them later when I get home, work connection is like being on a 56k modem again.

[Tonster]

I'm basically posting to say how fantastically jealous I am

As they ALL appear to be quite dark to me I have high hopes that you shot in RAW. That's good because adjusting images afterwards in RAW gives much better results as RAW files hold more data (higher dynamic lighting range). I always shoot in raw for the post processing quality, though the downside is you nearly always HAVE to post process RAW files to adjust brightness levels.

If you can afford the £200 price tag or know of another way of getting it, then Adobe Lightroom 2 will take care of your entire post-shoot workflow, from catalogueing to spot removal, rotation, export for final output etc, it's a great piece of software and you'd only need to dip into photoshop for really heavy editing like replacing a sky.

Love the giraffe shot!

Looks like a couple of your images needed a faster speed to prevent motion blur and a touch of sharpening will really help those hairs on the animals jump out.

[larchy]

fantastic m8, thanks for sharing! lucky bast!

Just to echo what has been said above, I think you might be able to improve the images with a bit of sharpening. Some of them look a bit washed out... others the lighting is obviously not ideal.

Really you just need to get them into the RAW converter and correct the lighting type/levels, then in Photoshop do the normal colour correction/saturation/selective blurring stuff where needed.

You've got the making of some really awesome shots, even though they're already great!

[larchy]

You can probably play around quite a lot with these... just quickly I'd maybe do something like this...




You can make the subjects bigger to make them stand out in a shot like this, move them around a bit to help the composition. Obviously if you have the higher resolution RAWs you can sharpen them up much better than this (especially if you can bring a larger area with them in down into a smaller res final image), and use grass/scenery etc from other shots (obviously the blending is crap here 'cos I didn't have owt to work with.. but you get the picture...)

You can up the contrast/saturation to make the image more vibrant... although that ain't everyone's thing and I haven't done it here, sometimes it looks good.

[Twisted]

How did you manage to take the picture of yourself in the balloon?

I can fly! Or I was in another balloon

As they ALL appear to be quite dark to me I have high hopes that you shot in RAW.

Unfortunatly only some of them where done in RAW the rest where high quality JPEG, the only reason I didnt do hem all in RAW was because I didn't think I had way to edit them while I was out there as I only had an old Sony Viao to dump the pics on to make sure I had enough space.

Looks like a couple of your images needed a faster speed to prevent motion blur and a touch of sharpening will really help those hairs on the animals jump out.

Aye a lot of the pics where proper spur of the moment using which ever setting I had the camera on (I.e the Bird in flight) to be honest this is the first time I used the camera properly. As long as I can brighten them up and sharpen up a bit I'll be happy.

That edit looks pretty good colour wise Larch pretty much what im going to try and get after a play about.

[larchy]

Just add a levels adjustment layer and pull the white point in toward the end of the big curve, and pull the black point in a couple of points.

That's all you probably need to do with most of them unless they're particularly washed out, in which case you can do some saturation.

[Tonster]

Aye a lot of the pics where proper spur of the moment using which ever setting I had the camera on (I.e the Bird in flight) to be honest this is the first time I used the camera properly.

A tip I was given for wildlife shooting (and shooting in general tbh as I don't actually shoot wildlife much), if your camera is sitting idle always leave it set TV (time value) mode with a fast shutter speed set. That way if you need to quickly grab it for a motion shot it's ready to go. It gives you a chance of getting that immediate shot off with half decent settings. Blur (camera shake or motion blur) will spoil more pictures than anything else.

I also recommend having the smallest area light metering option set and centre point focus only, that's all that's needed for the majority of shooting IMO, but that is a personal choice. I find it easy enough to focus on my subject, semi-depress the trigger, then reframe the shot if my focal point is not centre frame. Same with metering. I also find that method really makes me think about subject framing and not just have everything dead centre, though that can be adjusted in post processing with cropping to some degree of course.

You may find you shots are dark because of the bright light you were probably shooting in. It's really worth finding out how light metering works, stuff like how 18% grey fits in, dynamic ranging and reading the histogram. It may sound daunting at first but it will really help you get the light correct when you take the shot. There's a million and one tutorials online about this stuff, sorry I don't have time to dig out a link, I will if I remember next week.

I may sound like I know what I'm on about but I still suck at photography Plenty of reading the theory, not enough practice!