Fear nothing but fear itself.

Certainly, on new pro cameras (and soon on all), do not fear ISO.

Here’s a shot at 51,200 ISO (with a little Lightroom noise cancellation applied):

So now we can shoot handheld on the freeway as a car gets to exactly 250,000 km… no worries, just go to high ISO, find a brighht spot to focus on (or use manual focus), and away you go. (Be sure to expose well: pushing the exposure will result in more noise; pulling it will reduce noise).

 

4 thoughts on “Fear nothing but fear itself.

  1. Would you suggest using the camera’s built in noise reduction capabilities (Nikon: Hi ISO NR & Long Exp NR) or turning them off and using lightroom to adjust as necessary?

  2. Long exposure NR (at least on the brands I’m familiar with, Nikon and Olympus) is a true dark current correction. The camera reads the sensor a second time, with the shutter closed, to measure and correct for the inherent pixel-to-pixel differences in the sensor under those exact conditions. Dark current corrections (very beneficial if exposure times exceed one second or so, useless at fast shutter speeds) pretty much have to be done in camera, unless you do your post-processing in a mathematics environment such as Matlab.

    High ISO NR is usually a standard blur-it-a-bit-to-smooth-out-the-noise algorithm. I agree with Michael that this type is better left for post-processing, where you can see the detail vs. noise trade-off at full size.

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