It’s Cruise Night in Escondido

by | Apr 27, 2022

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

More and more cameras are offering higher ISO setting. The full-frame Pentax K-1 Mark II that I tested for Shutterbug has a high ISO setting of 819,200. Along with the good news comes the bad. I consider noise in digital photographs is the visual equivalent of static in radio signals and most digital cameras produce noise for lots of reasons.

Digital noise has many causes: Dark noise is produced by heat from the camera’s sensor during capture. The dark current produced is collected along with the light passing through the lens. The Panasonic Lumix GH6 has a built-in fan! While this is mostly for shooting video and should help in reducing noise in still photographs but… The camera has five fan settings, including off, but the GH6’s fan did not kick on when my friend Barry Staver was shooting stills with the camera and he couldn’t find any reference to it in Panasonic;s 800-page manual. Random noise is created by fluctuations within the camera’s circuitry or electromagnetic waves outside the camera.

Signal noise is caused by fluctuations in the distribution of how light strikes a sensor. You’ll sometimes hear the term signal-to-noise-ratio ratio, which is a measure of signal strength relative to background noise. Amplified noise is caused by high ISO speeds and is the digital equivalent of “pushing” film to achieve greater light sensitivity. Pushing film at ISO settings higher than the rated “box speed” usually adds more and larger grain to a photograph.Then there’s accumulative noise, which is caused by using slow shutter speeds.

How I made this shot: Some nighttime photography involves trial and error. For this shot of a hot road during Cruise Night in Escondido, California I used a Canon EOS 50D with EF28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens. I kicked the camera’s ISO setting up to 800, set the camera in Aperture Priority mode and just lived with the resulting 0.3 sec exposure because I was more concerned about the mood than capturing these street rods in sharp focus. I also experimented with Exposure Compensation and increased this shot by one-thirds stop but it was still slightly underexposed.

While most newer DSLRs and mirrorless cameras do a much better job of handling noise, especially at high ISO settings, than previous versions of the same camera, for all the reason above, it’s not going away anytime soon. For more on mitigating digital noise in your photographs, please read my post on my photography how-to blog: Tips for Dealing with Digital Noise...


 

 

Along with award-winning photographer Barry Staver, I’m co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s available from Amazon for $21.60 with used copies starting at  giveaway prices around five bucks, as I write this.