Hi guys,
Just as announced we did a Canon noise test yesterday night. The plan was to shoot the F-104G along the A28 motorway, as this seemed like a good subject for us aviation photographers. Doing a night shoot should make it a bit easier to determine the maximum noise rate, as day shootings usually turn out a lot better because of the light and exposure times.
In our mind the Starfighter has always been lit by floodlights, attracting attention for the Military Aviation Museum. But as we arrived, the situation turned out quite a bit worse than expected.... No direct lights pointing at the jet, leaving just a few streetlights to take care of illumination. This is what it looked like...... (try to spot the Starfighter!)
In order to get a tiny bit of extra light on the aircraft, we parked our cars in a way that our head lights might throuw two or three extra candles on the F-104G. It didn't do much, but we could use all available light now that the intended floodlights had been turned off.
For this test I used a 50mm/1.8 lens, so that I was able to shoot from ISO 50 up to ISO 102.400 with my Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. I did the same thing, from the same position and with the same lens, with the EOS-5D Mark II and EOS-7D. But as processing these results take a few hours per camera, I chose to check the results for my own camera first. I hope I can share the results for the 5D and 7D s0on.
The first animated gif shows the "cut-out" (uitsnede) at 100% resolution. So this is what you see when you zoom in your original photo at100%. The results shown below came straight from the camera, so without any post-processing at all. The second animated gif shows the full image, resized to 900 x 600. And again, I did not do any enhancing besides the resizing. So no noise filter, no sharpening, no color and contrast enhancement at all.
I'm curious about what other think of the result. Which ISO-setting is still acceptable to you ? Next to that I also wonder what the images will look like after the use of Noise Ninja or Neat image software.
Looking forward to uour replies.
Cheers,
Iwan