How to gain over 8 stops

I often take photos with room lights, tho our energy-efficient LED room lights aren’t really that bright, at least not when measured with a camera. Often enough the camera has to go all the way up to ISO 2500 (which I’ve set to the uppermost acceptable level, the Olympus E-PL5 will show everything from ISO 3200 as boosted or amplified anyway). Still I often don’t get really hand-holdable pictures, even with the very good in-body stabilization of our Olympus camera, and with fast prime lenses wide open.

So today I looked at the lights (one small reading light in the corner of our living room, and an over-the-table light in our dining area, and thought about the studio strobe with the beauty dish attached to it which is almost in the same position as that dining room light. What if I could use my small compact flash at about the position and pointing into the same direction (which is down) as our reading light?

Had to test it of course, and it really looks almost the same:

7df_1107157-emulating-lights

Study: emulating evening room lights with flashes

So this is ISO 200 with 1/160th of a second and the lens wide open at f/1.4 – with the room lights I would have had some 1/4 to 1/5th of a second at ISO 2500, or about 3 seconds at ISO 200. So even with boosting the shadows a bit afterwards, and with selecting “Auto gradation” in the OV3 raw processor, I still gained over 8 stops of light. And that is way more than you could get with switching your camera to the best “full frame” model you could get (like a Nikon D4s or a Sony A7s, both of which can go to ISO 400k or so). Even if you consider ISO 3200 on these cameras as practically noise-free, you’d still have shutter times of maybe 1/8th of a second – not enough for anything breathing.

Lights are much more important, and make a much bigger difference than any “dream camera” you could think of. Just try it.

Thanks for reading.