New towpath bird mural near Speirs Wharf – in daylight, at last

While you’ve seen this recently added bird mural on the Forth and Clyde canal towpath a short way from Speirs Wharf, there was a problem (for me at least) of getting there in daylight, so I had to do my usual available light trick, and even let the flash fire, just to get some early shots.

Now that we’ve done the crazy DST thing, I can get there while it’s still light, and caught the view below – still a little awkward though, as the sun was low and just off to the right, behind the subject.

My experience with film and flash in the past may have tainted my opinion, but I’d have to say I’m now fairly impressed with the result below (the pic on the right). Saturation may not be so good, but the colours and detail compare very favourably (to my eyes at least) compared to the available light version, on the left.

The one weird thing is that I set things up for a pic that leans toward contrast/sharpness, although I’ve been told these setting are not really noticeable, but have never checked.

As taken, the daylight pic was very dull, and lacked any real contrast, but responded very well to having these edited, which ended up almost matching the flash.

I would NOT have accepted the unedited version, or used it.

In fact, I find very few pics straight from the camera, and unprocessed, are acceptable.

I’ve developed a workflow, and run everything through it, almost without thinking about it.

Not every pic needs it, but many do, and look dull as delivered from the camera.

And, no, other than things like sharpness, I don’t have any post-processing set up in the camera.

I even saved RAW for a while, as ‘experts’ suggest JPG compression and in camera tweaks (e.g. colour balance) spoil the original, but, as I reported in another post, I did once try examining small areas of JPG and RAW saves, and couldn’t find any differences.

I might rerun that comparison, if I find this dullness effect persists, or becomes a problem.

New towpath bird mural near Speirs Wharf – with added SpongeBob

I got to play some low light games after discovering a new (to me, after an absence) mural near Spears Wharf on the fourth and Clyde canal towpath.

Currently, almost guaranteed to be in the dark when I get there at this time of year, I collected an available light pic of this bird while travelling one way, then stopped for a quick flash on the other.

This was so late in the day I suffered the usual problem, too dark for autofocus (and too far from the big mural for focus assist light too).

Luckily, there’s also a new SpongeBob mural just beside the bird, and it’s white, so I was able to pick up the focus there, and use it for the birb, sorry bird.

It’s intriguing to note just how little needed to be done to this almost black and white image, compared to the colourful bird.

We’ve seen this area before, or at least the wall Bringing a little reality to a ‘Lady of the Forth and Clyde Canal’

It went downhill, hard, after that when Donald J Trump is spraying murals along the Forth and Clyde Canal

The bird came out surprisingly well, I still can’t get used to the half decent colour rendering I get in the dark, and was able to run a comparison between the natural light and flash result.

Both pics have had no sharpening applied, because they contain noise, and I accepted the automatic adjustments and corrections. I usually don’t, and prefer to do this myself, but not when it does a good job.

Given the distance from the wall, I more than a little surprised by the even light coverage of the flash (it’s tiny), although both this and the available light pic chose the maximum ISO available. Having a flat subject also helped.

The big difference being a wide open aperture for the light shot, while the flash was able to close the aperture down, and this seems to have made a noticeable improvement.

All I have to do now is remember to take a normal daylight pic in a few weeks, and see how that compares.