Low-light Photo Edit - Little Grebe in Brockwell Park

One of the things currently impressing me most about the 600 f6.3 GM is how well the images clean up in editing.

It’s another area where it’d be a lie to say the 200-600 was bad, but it feels like this new lens is markedly better - at a guess, because of the extra detail retained by GM-level glass, though that’s basically saying ‘thing more expensive so better yes?’ but translated into buzzword.

I went out a few days ago toward the end of the light, not specifically to bird-hunt, more just to get a few steps in and try to push the inevitable mid-60s heart attack a little further out, but I took the 600 anyway, because it’s so light I can now just do that.

At those kind of light levels - mid-October evening, cloudy day, sun not quite down but far enough that the whole park was in shadow, it was reaching the point where the autofocus was taking a little longer.  It still found the target for the most part, but there was a bit of visible searching beforehand, whereas in good light it just grabs without hesitation.  The images themselves came out underexposed, though that wasn’t the lens, that was because I’ve got a hard ISO limit of 12800 set on the camera, and even that wasn’t high enough.

Toward the end of the walk, I could see rain on the horizon and went to head home, but got distracted by the Little Grebes on the middle pond.  This is one of the pictures I kept, straight-out-of-camera JPG version:

Sony 600 f6.3, 600mm, 1/1000, f/6.3, ISO 12800

Dust it with a little Lightroom, and you get this:

Sony 600 f6.3, 600mm, 1/1000, f/6.3, ISO 12800 + Lightroom

And I really do mean a little Lightroom, there’s no complicated colour grading here.  The full edit stack is:

• Crop

• Denoise (obv)

• Exposure +0.68 to compensate for the low light

• Contrast +23

• Highlights +37 

• Shadows -14

• Whites +23 - this plus the highlight boost gives the bird the glow

• Blacks +15 - TBH I’m not convinced this actually did anything, it gives the whole image a little more glow but I could probably have left it at 0 and barely noticed the difference

• Auto white balance (temp 5400, tint +30) - sometimes I’ll play around with the white balance for a particular look, but for a quick edit ‘try the presets and see if they look nice’ is usually good enough. 

• Vibrance +15

• Dehaze +10 - I like a little dehaze on water shots, it does good things to the surface texture.

No masks, no colour tweaks.  And that’s not to say this image couldn’t be made better if I spent an age playing with those things, but this represents about 5 minutes of editing time for a result I’m pretty happy with.

And again, could you get this out of the 200-600?  Sure, but the focus wouldn’t be as reliable, especially in that low light, and I feel like the high-ISO images didn’t always clean up as well.  Plus, of course, it’s heavy enough that I wouldn’t have just taken it out on spec to begin with so wouldn’t have had it to take any shots at all.