One of the contestants in the tie-down roping competition at Sunday’s Dripping Springs Rodeo.
Lighting inside Dripping Springs Ranch Park is pretty horrible so I seldom post pictures of the roping events because they happen at the far end of the arena and require a long lens. Couple that with the need for a fast shutter speed and we immediately get into the kind of high ISO territory that my OM-System cameras don’t handle particularly well. My OM-1 bodies are very much better than the previous generations, producing a type of noise that I don’t find particularly objectionable but, even so, the pictures are still a lot less clean than I would like.
This year, however, I have Topaz Photo AI so I fed a couple of the images through the tool to see what it could do. The main image on the post shows the result. For comparison, I’m adding the original shot below. The processed version definitely has very much lower noise but, even turning down the level of reduction, it’s a bit “plastic” looking. I’m not sure which I prefer. What do you think?
You can find all my photos from this year’s rodeo at https://davewilson.smugmug.com/Rodeo/Dripping-Springs-Rodeo-2023/.
For the technically inclined...