Last night I shot Steel Pulse in concert at the Belly Up Tavern. The Belly Up is not really a great place for photographers since it has no photo pit and the lights are usually quite low. I figured I would be shooting at ISO 6400 or higher and was looking forward to the challenge. What I did not take into account was that the band really likes to light up the stage and I could have easily shot at ISO 1600 last night. But I wanted to use higher shutter speeds to freeze the action and ISO 3200 for the Nikon D4 shouldn’t be a problem at all.
It wasn’t.
The images look really great and noise just isn’t a factor.
This shot of David was taken at 1/250 second, f/2.8 and ISO 3200. I did process it in lightroom 4 where I upped the Sharpening amount to 50 and the Luminance noise reduction to 20.
here is a 100% crop from the same image
The D4 performed exactly how I had hoped.
Great to see.
Same experience here with the 5DMKIII, ISO3200 is actually better than the old ISO1600 (MKII).
Exciting to see what the future will bring, maybe noise will be a thing of the past in 10 years and we will all be shooting razor-sharp images on ISO 100.000 without a problem.
So true Frank.
I went and looked at images shot with my old Nikon D2x and the highest I pushed the ISO was 640… and that 640 was noisier than the 3200 I shot at last night.
I always found that a problem with the “old” Nikons, now a days Nikon and Canon are so incredibly good that every new generation is opening new possibilities.