Last year I took pictures at two night-time Christmas parades without a flash. Some of the best pictures were when I had a short focal length like 18mm. I set the shutter speed to 1/50th of a second and the aperture was wide open at F3.5 for my lens. With Auto ISO, the ISO levels ranged from about 3200 to 12800. Not all of the photos turned out as good as I would have liked. If I take pictures like that this December, I going to try to use very short focal lengths and get closer to the subjects. It would be interesting if I got a full frame camera and took pictures with it in such similar conditions; the photos should turn out better.
Mine might be another approach in the mix đ
As mentioned when shooting film I will use the ISO setting read by the camera (DX coded film) or manual set the ISO to the mentioned ISO setting on the film canister or packaging. This will be 99% of the films. I seldom change that setting and when I do It will be the whole film and developing will be changed to adapt for the changed ISO setting.
A basic film rule (more or less) the lower the ISO the lower the grain will be. That is also the basic rule (more or less again) with digital, the lower ISO settings will have cleaner less "grainy" (noisy) images.
When I and my better half are shooting digital we both use the following basis "rules"
Starting point is 400 ISO, depending on the situation the ISO will be changed if needed.
Shooting in the sun on the beach or on a clear day the ISO goes down
Shooting under darker circumstances we raise the ISO.
Shooting wide angle to short tele lenses we most use a lower ISO
With the longer tele lenses we use a higher ISO
And with the recent sensors you can go high if needed, I've shot these deer at 12800 ISO with a Canon Eos 6D mark II
(Only some basic processing settings used in Canon's DPP)
I don't normally see the Mandarins along the river but I guess they're expanding their home base which is a good thing. Sometimes when we're lucky the birds/ducks will approach us, this Grebe swam close to shore and I got it with the trusty 300mm my goto lens. Unless I'm carrying two cameras I tend to keep the Tamron 70-300 on the 7D mkII and swap out to other lenses when needed.
I love that bright red color. Did you take that at ISO100? There's enough light etc. I was just curious, since that is what we recently were talking about. Dprevived does not always show the EXIF data (it comes and goes), which is why I'm glad I keep using my computer program to display it.
Edit: Oh, I now see the ISO levels (the EXIF data came back). That's plenty low enough.
Someone recently told me some good taking lenses, stopped down with added extension might be better (at least sharper) than a dedicated macro lens... While I can't confirm that so far from my quick tests, I feel like results look interesting nonetheless...
I know very little about lenses, since I only use a few of them. I do like the second picture better. What do you think about doing comparative tests with the same items and conditions etc.?
You're right of course... that makes a lot of sense in order to know which lens really IS better. But I usually don't want to do that right away, when I get a new lens or use one in an unusual way the first time. Why? Because it limits my thinking to "lens test mode" and I can say (at least for myself) once I'm in there I tend to lack most creative thinking. I usually want to know if a lens has something interesting and unique to bring to the table before I want to know how it fares in a direct comparison.
But once the 'testing a lens on its own merits' is done, I like to do direct comparisons on the same subjects as well!
High ISO values are irrelevant today, unless there is noise in the shadows that cannot be removed by DXOâs Deep Prime, which always works miracles for me and is well worth the admission price. (Black Friday discounts coming up!)
Display of EXIF on these pages. I dont know why it happens, but when missing, it can always be restored by refreshing the page.
@davidwien I usually share photos here at 1080p on the long edge. I used to use smaller files, with watermarks, but after a short discussion in the early(er) days of DPRevived, I decided it's not really worth it. This I just try to make viewing the photo as enjoyable as possible. Perhaps, in the future, if I get more serious with my photography, I'll take a different approach.
I'll use larger files here from now on.
The 10 stop ND filter I had purchased was casting a horrible gtreenish/orangeish color cast over everything. This morning I cycled through all of the White Balance presets, and lo and behold, the Auto White Balance took care of the color cast. Now, I'm not strictly limited to Black and White.
