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Thanks, Tord.
I was afraid at the time that there wouldn't be enough light, so I went up to ISO 800. Normally 400 is my limit, but you can get away with higher if you don't have to crop much, like on this one. He was close enough and I wanted to keep the wodden fence.
He was almost still enough to do a three shot stack, but not quite. The stack has less noise and a little more detail, but there is a little ghosting caused by the tiny bit of movement between the three shot at 6 fps.
It was a nice end to an otherwise uneventful three day trip to Hungary, with the exception of a pair of Red-necked Phalarope, a real rarity around here. No doubt just passing through...
15131299459_edac675362_b.jpg
 
it's been a long absence for me

Hi guys

It's been a while since I've posted. I've had some issues with my lower back and had to make some equipment corrections in order to come up with a lighter setup. I shifted away from my heavy Stellarvue f/7 scope and monfrotto tripod which had a combined weight in excess of 17 lbs. I went back to my DIY f/5 refractor and made some changes to the optical tube to increase contrast and add an internal GSO barlow. The original post of my refractor can be found on "Setups." Anyway I ditched the tripod in favor of a monopod and Walking Stool. Much easier on my back. See attached. Today I managed to get out to the local watering hole for a few snaps. I am using an Olympus e-30 with IS2 set on to 500mm. The cormorant was an opportunity shot that I doubt I would have gotten using the bigger heavier tripod rig.
 

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Arctic Terns

Some Arctic Terns from the past summer...

TS102, EM-5
 

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As we all know, air is our worst enemy. Here is an example of a way to reduce the ill effects of too much air with just two shots. Naturally, more would be better, but tell the to the Kingfisher. I was lucky to get two out of a burst.
The two originals:
15447211486_5dabc105b3_b.jpg15283596540_b2ce8c457a_b.jpg
and a stack of the two, with no other changes made (except for cloning out the white fleck):
15469963912_7224d3c424_b.jpg
Stacked with CombineZM
 
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Those look really good. I downloaded CombineZM but I can't get it to run on my 64bit Windows 8 machine. I tried it in all compatibility modes but no joy.

Edit - got it running now. Had to put CombineZM and fftw3.dll into the same folder. That dll file is missing on 64 bit machines and CombineZM wont run without it. They have to be in the same folder to get it to work. The guy who made that CombineZM software no longer has a website but I managed to download it from an archive here. http://web.archive.org/web/20070625060237/http://www.hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/CZM/CombineZM.exe

Paul.
 
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Photoshop will do focus stacking too. Load all the photos into layers in the one image. Select all the layers and then go Edit - Auto align layers and after that keep all the layers selected and go Edit - Auto blend all layers and choose Stack.

Using your two kingfisher photos it came out like this.

Paul.
 

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That actually looks cleaner. Note the artifacts in the tail feathers in the CZ stack. Do you know from which version on the auto stacking became a part of PS? (I have CS2)
 
DanC.Licks said:
That actually looks cleaner. Note the artifacts in the tail feathers in the CZ stack. Do you know from which version on the auto stacking became a part of PS? (I have CS2)
Click to expand...

According to this guy here it was from CS4 onwards but he says it wasn't until CS5 that it was really perfected. I think some versions of Adobe Elements can do it too.

Paul.
 
CombineZP can be had as a direct download from the owners site which is archived here. http://web.archive.org/web/20090215005244/http://hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/CZP/CombineZP.msi

I'm always wary of sites like the one Dan linked to as you never know if they have added any spyware. I downloaded the one on Dan's link and the file is a few kb bigger than the one from the owners website. Looking at the properties of the file, they were created on the same date at the same time of day so I think the one from the owners website would be the safer bet.

CombineZP worked fine on my Win8.1 64 bit machine.

Paul.
 
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