Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Landscape & Nature Photography => Topic started by: hdomke on September 21, 2010, 01:07:27 pm
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I want to photograph birds coming to my feeder. Shooting through our double-pane insulated glass has given horrible results: soft and low contrast. Does anyone have experience with other glass? If plate glass or some other glass gave excellent results I might change one pane to allow better images.
Thanks for any help!
Henry
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I want to photograph birds coming to my feeder. Shooting through our double-pane insulated glass has given horrible results: soft and low contrast. Does anyone have experience with other glass? If plate glass or some other glass gave excellent results I might change one pane to allow better images.
I'm not sure if this would help or not, but you might take a look at the book Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking by Julieanne Kost, which is all about photos taken through airplane windows.
She includes an appendix explaining the processing she does. (“As you can see from the pre- and post-processed images on the previous page, the raw images captured at 30,000 feet through airplane windows need a significant amount of adjustment. Their dynamic range is uncharacteristally narrow, their appearance dull, dreary, and uninteresting….”)
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I want to photograph birds coming to my feeder. Shooting through our double-pane insulated glass has given horrible results: soft and low contrast. Does anyone have experience with other glass? If plate glass or some other glass gave excellent results I might change one pane to allow better images.
Thanks for any help!
Henry
I have a bird table outside my office window, and have been thinking of taking a pane out... but I do not have double-pain (double glazing).
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I want to photograph birds coming to my feeder. Shooting through our double-pane insulated glass has given horrible results: soft and low contrast. Does anyone have experience with other glass? If plate glass or some other glass gave excellent results I might change one pane to allow better images.
It's possible to get good photographs through double-pane windows. I've got a number of such photos on my website. Here's one example:
http://www.joecolsonphotography.com/galleries/birds/050101_9085.html
There are several tips might help. First, make sure the window is in a shaded area. Direct sunlight on the window will produce poor results. Second, make sure the window is spotless, inside and out, and not fogged between the glazing. Finally, place the front of the lens directly on the inside glass surface to prevent reflections. Use a rubber lens hood if necessary. Those steps have worked well for me.
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probably the most important thing in photographing thru windows is getting the camera close to the glass with a nice large rubber lens hood and having the window in shade - if the sun is shining on the window, forget it
if your double pane windows are coated, this may be an additional problem
thanks for the reference to Window Seat. my experience with photographing from commercial flights is - a) plan ahead and get on the correct side of the plane for backlight and subjects of interest (for example - from Bhutan to Nepal in the morning you want the right side of the plane) sometimes you can figure out the routes from the map, but i'd love to hear of any resources for particular routes, b) with the camera up to the window, you can get decent images thru really nasty looking windows so long as you're shooting RAW and processing in LR, etc.
sometimes you're luck - recently flew from SFO to Albuquerque on the left side in afternoon, pilot said best views of Grand Canyon he'd ever seen, i thought the little windows on the United shuttle were incredibly scratched, but my wife urged me to shoot. 5d2 and 24-105, minimal dynamic range, but when you're focussing at infinity the window filter isn't too bad and Lightroom pulled some vary nice images from the limitedl dynamic range.
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Having done everything you can as previously suggested, the next step is probably really useful.
I've just shot through clear plastic, not glass, taking shots of the Mgadigadi pans in Botswana from the air.
I then used Capture 1. 5. "Clarity tool" which has transformed everything. You almost can't tell there's a window there.
Peter