…in spite of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom has it that the Canon 7D is not the best for high ISO shots. And that you need twice the lens length, so 50mm on a crop camera needs 1/160th second..
So you could not possibly do a shot like this at
- 3200 ISO
- in available tungsten light
- with a 50mm f/1.4 lens
- set to f/2 at 1/40th sec0nd,
- hand-held:
Cat, 3200 ISO, f/2, 1/40th sec, Canon 7D, 50mm
Yes you can. Hand held, slight noise reduction applied in Lightroom.
That is a great shot of the cat. The sharpness and details are awesome at such high ISO. I am a 7D user as well, and I’m very happy with its high ISO performance. Here is a picture I shot in a theatre at ISO 6400 http://franklinwang.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/earth-rangers/. However, I think the luminance noise at ISO 400 and 800 is more visible than it should be, especially with portraits. Do you have the same experience?
Hi Franklin. Yes, I too see that at 400/800 it is more noisy than I would like but it does depend on how I light. Willems’ Dictum is that “bright pixels are sharp pixels”, and that also means low-noise pixels.
It also depends on the software I use. Lightroom is pretty good but Lightroom 3 will be much better. I wait with bated breath.