No, I’m not Steve Huff, so excuse the title. But what would you expect when taking photos with a Micro Four Thirds camera set to ISO 25600, with no noise reduction? Not much I guess. Well this morning I took a few photos of Mitchie in almost complete darkness, lit only from the back by the remote kitchen light, and from the side illumination of her tablet or phone screen (forgot). At ISO 25600. And guess what – when I removed the colours (the two light sources had different temperatures), I quite liked it. A bit like film, and not too grainy.
What if I tried that even with colour? Here are two of Tuna which I took some minutes ago:
Again, both taken at ISO 25600 with no noise reduction, and also without sharpening. In fact I didn’t try any processing here and converted the raw files like they came out of camera (with saturation set to “-1”). If you try to change anything (like the saturation for instance), things fall apart quickly. But you can still improve them when converting them to black & white.
Of course the dynamic range of these is reduced, but the noise even doesn’t bother me too much even when looking at them at the size of my 24 inch monitor. I guess an A4-sized print would still be ok.
Pretty amazing what these small cameras can do today.
Thanks for reading.