For several years starting with my old D70 I have been taking shots of my daughters dance group. Back in the days of the D70, shooting at ISO 800 was a chore. Then came my D200. Again, ISO 800-1600 left lots to desire with lots of pp and noise reduction.
Well last night I went again but this time with the D300. There are straight from the camera, shot as RAW at ISO 1600. There was no PP other than a bit of edge sharpening. This will print extrmemely well at 12x18 with no hint of noise.
There is NO noise reduction on this at all.
Amazing camera

At first I wasn't very happy with the D300's high ISO performance from 1600 upwards, but when I turned in-camera noise reduction off all of a sudden I liked it a lot more.

The picture control settings you use make an obvious difference to the results, but I think the bigger impact comes from not sacrificing detail for the sake of lower grain/noise. I think people's eyes accept noisier images just fine so long the colour is correct and the detail is still there.

I'm now perfectly happy with ISO 3200 images from the D300 if I've used the right picture control settings and nailed my exposure. And I also really like ISO 6400 images if they're converted to monochrome (I'm yet to see a colour 6400 shot that I was satisfied with)

that looks pretty cool to me. nice work

Great shot. Would you mind telling us what lens you used and settings on the shot. Thanks.

Mark Kenfield wrote:
At first I wasn't very happy with the D300's high ISO performance from 1600 upwards, but when I turned in-camera noise reduction off all of a sudden I liked it a lot more.

The picture control settings you use make an obvious difference to the results, but I think the bigger impact comes from not sacrificing detail for the sake of lower grain/noise. I think people's eyes accept noisier images just fine so long the colour is correct and the detail is still there.

I'm now perfectly happy with ISO 3200 images from the D300 if I've used the right picture control settings and nailed my exposure. And I also really like ISO 6400 images if they're converted to monochrome (I'm yet to see a colour 6400 shot that I was satisfied with)

This is a raw image processed in photoshop. As such there are no picture controls / sharpness / no reduction at all. Pure raw.

scorpio1 wrote:
Great shot. Would you mind telling us what lens you used and settings on the shot. Thanks.
This is a 70-200 2.8 with ISO 1600, 1/125 f2.8 raw.