I admit these are much better than I thought would be possible with that technique.
I'm normally careful about criticizing people's pictures, but here is my honest opinion about those:
- we are looking at web resized shots so maybe this is partly causing the issues I'm seeing
- while these are perfectly fine for posting on the forum or on social media as unfortunately the norm for photographically high-quality pictures continue to drop there, these are not what I would call quality shots (photographically that is)
-looking at the texture I don't see the sharpness i would desire from an SLR even with non pro glass.
-surprisingly I don't see the amount of noise I would have expected but I can't tell how underexposed these were as I
don't have the preprocessing shots.
-was any De-noising DW or processing done as again if those were really black as you mentioned I'm surprised with the minimal noise you're getting. I get more noise from slightly underexposed shots on cameras known for high iso low noise performance.
-normally any shot that is more than one stop underexposed would be tricky to brighten and not get noise especially in the shadows hence I'd rather have the exposure right in the camera.
-not bashing the technique but would rather see an apple-to-apple comparison on a shot done as you propose, and same shot taken at higher ISO to get the exposure right. normally higher ISO properly exposed shots would get better quality than severely underexposed shots adjusted in PP. Still my interest would be to see slightly underexposed shots by one stop at max maybe adjusted in post processing to enhance exposure
a bit and get the best of both words.
not saying that these are perfect but this is what I would aim for in terms of motion freeze , colors, texture in aquarium shots. for fish a controlled flash has been added to brighten the shadows and freeze motion and keeping flash to a minimum kept it from washing the highlights.
