Considering my previous post, I thought that the original image may not have been good enough to make a fair choice, so I have decided to reprocess a favourite image of the old aye-aye 'Mamie' at Chester to give a fairer choice. I also decided to make it a poll so it's easy to reply - although if you want to make a comment too, please do so. I recommend that you click through the small image below twice, to get the full size version. The 4 photos are A the original image taken under red light B the version already in the Gallery with reduced red colouring, to match what the eye sees C a colour corrected version (as close to natural colour as I can make it). D a monochrome version Nocturnal House Choices Number 2 by gentle lemur posted 6 Oct 2020 at 10:01 PM
These are all brilliant photos / versions @gentle lemur so it is actually quite hard to choose ( I did go for photo B though).
I like the monochrome versions this photo and the one in your other post. To me they display how one would see a nocturnal animal in the wild on a moonlit night. Just different shades of grey.
You extracted the colors so well out of C but I just prefer B. It appears to be more well defined even with the red light present. Both are well done but B appears sharper and softness of the light seems to bring out better detail of the aye-aye Job well done! Btw do you ever use any lenses with a larger aperture for the nocturnal houses? My 85mm f/1.8 does well in these situations and reduces the need for a huge amount of ISO on my Z50 since it’s an DX camera body. I don’t have any open nocturnal houses open here on California due to COVID :/ waiting for the LA Zoo to open it up again haha
An 85mm f/1.8 is an excellent choice for a nocturnal house, provided its minimum focal distance is reasonably short and the focus adjustment is spot-on: but I usually carry 4 lenses anyway, so I wouldn't want to carry another or to lose one of present ones, unless I knew I was going to shoot something special in a nocturnal house and avoid any small stuff in an aquarium or reptile house, for example. That means shooting at slower shutter speeds or higher ISO or both: luckily many nocturnal creatures do not move too quickly and VR helps me to keep the camera steady, so I just shoot plenty of images knowing that there bound to be some blurred ones to throw away.
I wish the Z50 had VR built in besides the kit lenses. I do shoot at minimum at 1/125 with ISO bumped up to make up for the lack of VR. Continuous shooting is a must in those environments and always have some that need to be tossed away after reviewing them haha
