Trust Your Camera's ISO Processing

Ever since I've begun digital photography, the noise created by high ISO settings has absolutely driven me batty. I love the crispness of the lowest ISO settings. Well, this creates trouble when you don't have a lens to get the image you want without cropping. Cropping makes the ISO noise more apparent - it's just that simple. This bit of obsessiveness on my part has really hurt my photography. I've kept myself shooting wide open, and letting the shutter speed drop too low for my subject when confronted with low light. This makes for bad photography!

I at least got over my fear of thick blacks in my photographs, as I talked about here. Aaron Zebrook really opened my eyes as to how you can use the darkness of your frame to make your photographs that much better. But, still, I've not pushed my camera. Here I have this incredible piece of technology, and I'm not asking it to even break a sweat. And, as a result, my photos just aren't that good without a boost from Lightroom. Even then, a lot of what I'm failing to do can't be rescued with software.

Since it's winter, a lot of my photography is being done in either terrible light (grey, cloudy skies), or in darkness. This has made me pretty frustrated, to be honest, because the things I want to shoot aren't only perfect for my 35mm f/1.8 lens. I like using my cheap zoom, which gets me down to f/5.6, and means I have to get my shutter speed up to around 1/250 just to keep a sharp shot. In this light, that's not happening - unless I learn to suck it up and trust my camera's ISO performance.

Equipment Used

Nikon D7100 Camera
35mm f/1.8 lens
55-200mm f/4-5.6 lens
Nikon MC-DC2 Cable Release
Velbon Tripod

Images

A zoo shot with the telephoto lens (100mm f/4.5), ISO bumped up to 400. This is cropped.

250mm, 1/200, f/5.6, ISO 800. That still wasn't enough, and I "over developed" the photo by a full stop in Lightroom.

200mm, 1/40, f/5.6, ISO 640. A little bit more of a challenge to keep the motion, keep the detail in flat light, and keep the camera steady!

What could have been an amazing shot - but focusing in the dark means manual focusing. I neglected to use Live View, and, as a result, this is out of focus.