While the sun was shining when I left home, arriving at Zealandia it was not. Dull drab light is never fun for bird photography, especially in the bush. I changed my camera settings to suit the light, with an aim to get a usable shutter speed. To achieve that I had to use an ISO setting of 12800! I remember a time back with my old DLSR cameras where even going to 1600 was risky. The G9II mirrorless system copes really well is high ISO, just another reason why I like it so much!
These images started out with a lot of noise in them. Thankfully with good processing software and a touch of skill picked up over the last 20 years or so, I have managed to get some images that I am happy with. We didn’t see a lot of birds either, I suspect they weren’t any happier about the light than we were. The kereru just wanted to fluff up his feathers and sleep. The kaka had to deal with a large number of blackbirds hassling it for food scraps, the little scaup, well he just wanted to go fishing under water all the time and the hihi, well he was only a brief visitor, there one minute, gone the next.
For those who want to know, I used DXO Pure Raw4, followed by a touch of Topaz Denoise in my processing of these images.
