From time to time, I get the urge to wield my digital brush a little harder than is appropriate for a pure nature photographer. A cormorant on a stick against a blue sky? Okay… we’ve seen that before, so let’s see if we can make it a bit more dramatic.

Yesterday’s afternoon was dedicated to cycling and photography (thanks, Nadine!), and I was able to test out my new beauty a bit. I’m halfway satisfied with the results: the focus is a bit off, but that could also have been due to the backlight. I didn’t use tracking or all that AI stuff in the reeds. There’s something about the images that I don’t like compared to the D7200’s output. The images look sharper and more artificial than with the old camera, which I actually quite like, but when I zoom in to 100%, they look like they were captured using an algorithm. There aren’t the typical JPG artifacts (I shoot in RAW), but something is different. Lightroom also seems to be a lot faster with the new images than with the old ones, even though the resolution is the same. Is something missing from the dataset? Maybe this is just whining at a high level and I’m looking at it too narrowly, but feeling is feeling.