Editing The Wildlife Weekend Files

A Bald Eagle staring me down! (click to enlarge)
Nikon D850; Tamron 150-600,, G2 lens @ 600mm; 1/1000th sec. @ f/8; ISO 360
This is a 7.5mp crop of the original 47mp file.  Huge files are nice so you can crop in like this, but...

Over the weekend I spent a considerable amount of time editing many of the 1600+ image files I made on my annual extended wildlife weekend.  In fact, it took more time than I expected.  Those 47mp highly detailed Nikon D850 and Z7 files are fantastic but there is a downside I hadn’t considered to having and working with those huge files as well.  I will have many more of those wildlife and landscape images to post at the end of this week.

First, the Nikon files are about twice the size of my Olympus and Fujifilm files.  That means it takes longer for the computer to process each of them.  Each time I moved a slider or adjusted something in Lightroom took just a bit longer. Now I don’t have the newest computer but mine has an Intel i7 chip, 24gb of RAM and a current graphics card.  Also, my computer is equipped with two Samsung EVO SSD drives.  it is fast.  Still, I can easily see that every file takes longer to edit.  If you have a large number of files to edit and time is of the essence to you, these large files can be your enemy.

Second, I had forgotten just how good Olympus’ and Fujifilm’s in-camera sensor cleaning mechanism really is.  I had also forgotten how poor Nikon’s is.  I’ve had the E-M1 Mark II since Olympus released it, have shot well over 10,000 images over a wide variety of outdoor situations and except for the occasional blow from my bulb blower, I never have never had to clean the sensor nor have I seen dust in my image files.  Same with the Fujifilm files.  Nikon?  I can see dust in most of them.  A quick treatment from my Rocket Blower doesn’t seem to help much.  Removing multiple dust spots in lots of files while editing is a real pain.  It really slows down the editing process.

We often talk about how great the full frame high megapixel files are when we look at the luscious detail contained within them.  But we don’t often talk about the negatives associated with those files.  I just wanted to pass on a couple of downsides of having huge full frame digital image files as compared to moderately sized files.  

If you are an Olympus or Fujifilm user, be thankful.  If you are a Nikon user, well, you will just have to bear with these issues to enjoy those big files.  Everything is a trade-off.

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Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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