Transparent Freedom
by sweetness

Comment by PaulE:
Greetings from the Critique Club.

Hi Lar,

Welcome to DPC! Congratulations on your first submission. It's very brave of you to enter a Free Study for your first submission - the voters are always that much mroe critical because there are no subject limitations.

Others have already commented on the noise and general softness in this image. I'm sure you can see it too, so I won't dwell on what is wrong. Instead I will try to help you understand why this has occurred. looking at your Aperature, ISO and Shutterspeed it is easy for me to understand why there is so much noise. The ISO of 1600 is very high, and almost certian to give this much noise with a D70. so how could you reduce the ISO? After all you need the quick shutterspeed to 'stop' the bird. The answer would be to increase the size of the aperture (a smaller f/number). I'm guessing you were near full zoom for this so you could have gone up to f/5.6. This would have drastically increased the size of the hole to let light through when you made your exposure, and would have allowed you to use a lower ISO - maybe 400.

I note that you don't yet have any editing software. There are some on the web that you can download for free that would help you. GIMP is a shareware photo editting product that is pretty powerful. And NeatImage is a noise removal product that has a free demo version. I recommend you take the tiem to download both. A little bit of sharpening would have worked miracles here.

Keep at it, and hope to see more submissions from you soon.

It is my hope that these insights are helpful and constructive. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions regarding this critique. And please remember to mark it "Helpful" if you found it so. Good luck with future challenges.

Cheers
Paul

Transparent Freedom
by sweetness

Comment by RolandB:
This needs to be run through noise reduction. Nice compositional capture, but blowing it up so much caused excessive noise.

Transparent Freedom
by sweetness

Comment by ArpeggioAngel:
Nice motion capture but too grainy for my liking.

Transparent Freedom
by sweetness

Comment by kandykarml:
There's a ton of noise on the image that takes away just a bit.Try NeatImage. It would really clear all that out. Nice capture though.Beautiful wing span.

Transparent Freedom
by sweetness

Comment by bdenny:
What a great capture! But IMO there's too much noise/grain. Other than that, its WONDERFUL!