30.08.2020 A matter of scale and sharpness.

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Sunday. A nearly two hour long, early morning walk in the countryside. There was a total lack of traffic noise. The G9 was fitted with the Leica 50-200 + TC14 1.4x teleconverter for 70-280mm. All slung as usual on the diagonal across my body on its strap. So that the camera's weight goes largely unnoticed. 321 images captured today.

Small groups of deer were grazing in the stubble fields. Birds of prey and other birds flew overhead. I stumbled upon a pair of deer grazing on a quiet track. They didn't seem to notice me as I stood stock still in my [cheap] new [dark] camouflage jacket. There follows an exercise in cropping an image to improve the composition. I used PhotoFiltre7 for all processing.

The deer in the pictures started walking towards me and continued as if I were invisible. I
snapped away at 280mm hoping to get a nice pose from at least one of my images. This is the one I chose to work on. 1/640s f5.6 ISO 5000. Program, Auto ISO, Auto Exposure, Auto Aperture and Auto Focus. The ISO is far too high and must have introduced some noise.

Google has automatically resized the original 5184x3888 image [Top left] to 1600x1200. [Click]

Note that I have manually downsized all of the other images for the blog format. The original, full image [Above right] is untouched but resized from 5184x3888 pixels to 1000 x 750 pixels.

This resizing always visibly softens an image but cannot be avoided if the blog is not to crawl during downloads on slow internet connections. I am spoilt by a symmetrical, optical fibre, 110Mbps/110Mbps service but must never forget others are not usually so fortunate.You may be able to left click on some of these images for a larger version. Thought this may be limited to only the blogger himself.

The third  image [Left] has been cropped slightly and resized to 1000 pixels max. Some adjustments have been made to sharpen the image and to strengthen the colour slightly. This is arguably the sharpest image shown.

The fourth image [Right] has been far more heavily cropped to digitally enlarge the deer. This also removed the other deer from the background. Which was rather distracting because of its awkward pose. Being out of focus, due to the shallow depth of field, didn't really help. This fourth image has lost much of its sharpness due to digital enlargement [heavy cropping] and downsizing. 783 x 1000 pixels when enlarged by double clicking.

Incidentally, the shiny black "moustache" on the deer's muzzle is a natural feature despite looking so completely artificial. Presumably the result of grazing dew soaked grass and other plants.

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