A Look Back with Today’s Software

 I had a Facebook comments “conversation” with a member of the Rock Hill, SC Photographers Facebook group yesterday.

Denise Wicker Cobb had posted a couple of photographs of a Cormorant. I commented: “Very nice. I have yet to get a photograph of a cormorant that I really like.”

Denise replied: “Chris Quillen they aren’t very pretty birds. I’m still trying to get a decent shot of an eagle.”

And I remembered that I had photographed eagles some years ago along the Rock River behind the Post Office in Beloit. So I got out my archive hard drive and began to search for them. It took me awhile but I did find them. The photos were shot using a Nikon D300 and a 12 year old 300mm f/4 Nikon lens. The D300 is a 12 megapixel camera.

At the time, I processed them with Lightroom. So I launched Lightroom and thought I’d see what I could do using Topaz Photo AI to sharpen the images and upscale one of them and wow, I was impressed with the results.

Here are three versions of one of the photographs. The first is the full frame, the second a cropped version, and the third cropped even more and sharpened and upscaled in Topaz Photo AI.

And here are several more with the full frame and the cropped and processed image.

And one that was just cropped and processed with Topaz Photo AI.

So for me here are the takeaways. Your thought may be different.

1. Unless you are going to make really big prints, megapixels do not matter. Most images today are viewed online; Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, SmugMug, a photographer’s web site, etc., so a high megapixel camera is really not necessary.
2. These eagle photographs were taken with a camera with no subject detection auto focus, no subject tracking auto focus, no in-body or lens image stabilization, and no frame rate higher the 6 frames a second. All those things make it easier to get the photographs you want but they are not necessary.
3. Topaz Photo AI can improve the quality of your images with careful processing. It’s worth it to take a look back at your catalog, whether Lightroom, Capture One, or some other software, and see which images could be improved by using Topaz Photo AI.

“Tri-X, f/8, and be there.“