Robin Wong had an article on his blog lately which he called “About High ISO Shooting with Olympus“. And in his post he showed some impressive images done with ISO settings between 3200 and 6400. One commenter accused him of cheating because his photos were reduced in size, which helps suppressing noise (with reducing the overall size of a picture, the grain gets smaller and so less visible as well).
Of course Robin wouldn’t have to do that – he proved often enough with 100% crops how good these modern cameras actually are. Look at this one:
Two cups at ISO 6400
Like he wrote, it helps if you don’t underexpose. It also helps if you take a custom white balance even before you go for your final image, especially in diificult light. The light here came from our kitchen, ca. 5 meters away, from a 7 or 8 Watt power saving LED bulb. So even with ISO 6400 and with no underexposure, I had a time of about 1/8th of a second with an aperture of f/2.2.
For all those who think Robin was cheating – go ahead and download the full resolution image from Flickr if you want. If you “pixel-peep” at full size, will you see noise? Sure. But if you look at the whole image on a 24 inch monitor like mine, you’d have something like an A3 print. Noise at that magnification? Sure, it’s still there, but on paper it would be gone if you view that from a normal distance. Plus the noise is a bit like film grain, but much finer and less obtrusive than anything I ever achieved with real film in the small 24x36mm format (which they nowadays call “full frame”). It’s no comparison at all; this is much better.
Anyway – thanks to Robin who showed much better (and lots more) pictures than I have here as my quick eexample shot. But I even dared to do it with “crappy” light – and the result is still pretty good enough for my eyes.
Thanks for reading.