Sunday 12 February 2012

Using the Pro Low Light setting

When you're shooting stationary objects, this setting can be surprisingly good, and is worth a go. 

Only available as 6MP jpegs. the camera takes multiple exposures and combines them into one file, aligning them as it goes along (handholding seems to work fine) and processing out random digital noise so you end up with detailed and perfectly acceptable files at higher ISOs (even 3200 is OK).  The camera does seem to veer towards overexposure in this mode, so I set some -EV using the compensation dial, and also tend to darken the shadows a little in post-processing. 

I'm also wondering if this is about as good as things are likely to get in tackling the dreaded orbs in night time shots - shooting at higher ISO should keep them to a minium, and using this mode should also help with the noise.  Another experiment for another time....

In the meantime, a couple of quick shots taken at home.  The watch is ISO500 (and looks great even at 100%) but poor old Beethoven had the noise turned up a little - ISO1000.  These kind of shots would have been unheard of from a small sensor camera until very recently: