Ditched the tripod today to try my hand at, well, handheld. Before leaving the house I tested/calibrated how low I can shoot handheld with the 50 f/1.8G and get pixel-sharp photo...came in around 1/40, which is better than I expected because I'm about average when it comes to hand'holdability and stability.
These are all shot at base ISO, pushed in post when necessary (ISOless). The flower shots are indoors at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas, with sunlight coming through the glass ceiling. Tried to keep the shutter at or above 1/50. All shot raw, processed with ACR 6.7RC, including ACR sharpening + CS5 micro-contrast sharpening.
snapsy wrote:
Ditched the tripod today to try my hand at, well, handheld. Before leaving the house I tested/calibrated how low I can shoot handheld with the 50 f/1.8G and get pixel-sharp photo...came in around 1/40, which is better than I expected because I'm about average when it comes to hand'holdability and stability.
These are all shot at base ISO, pushed in post when necessary (ISOless). The flower shots are indoors at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas, with sunlight coming through the glass ceiling. Tried to keep the shutter at or above 1/50. All shot raw, processed with ACR 6.7RC, including ACR sharpening + CS5 micro-contrast sharpening.
BigIronCruiser wrote:
What kind of trouble did you have with color shift when you pushed # 8?
I haven't had any noticeable color shift / hue-twist issues in my pushes except for the very deepest pushes (ISO 100 -> 3200+) and the only color shift there is a slight green tint in the shadows from ACR, which is corrected with a +2 shadow tint adjustment (in the ACR camera calibration tab). I haven't examined skin tones yet so that assessment may change.
Here's a color checker chart at ISO 100, ISO 6400, and then ISO 100 pushed to ISO 6400. No ACR color changes were done on the push except for the aforementioned +2 shadow tint.
snapsy wrote:
Ditched the tripod today to try my hand at, well, handheld. Before leaving the house I tested/calibrated how low I can shoot handheld with the 50 f/1.8G and get pixel-sharp photo...came in around 1/40, which is better than I expected because I'm about average when it comes to hand'holdability and stability.
These are all shot at base ISO, pushed in post when necessary (ISOless). The flower shots are indoors at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas, with sunlight coming through the glass ceiling. Tried to keep the shutter at or above 1/50. All shot raw, processed with ACR 6.7RC, including ACR sharpening + CS5 micro-contrast sharpening.
Snapsy, these shots are quite amazing and thank you for taking the time to post them. Apart from being impressed with how clean the native 6400 shot is, coming from Canonland the concept of ISOless shooting seems as feasible as Newt's moon colony so it isn't something I have been paying attention to.
Would I be correct in assuming that a ISO 100 shot pushed 4 stops would have the noise characteristics of an ISO 100 shot (or something close) rather 1600? If so, does the relationship stay linear as one moves up in base ISO? For example, can you push an ISO 800 shot by say 3 stops in post and come out less noisy than a native 6400 shot? I am sure there is a point of diminishing returns and limits in practical application, any idea where those limits are?
Hrow wrote:
Would I be correct in assuming that a ISO 100 shot pushed 4 stops would have the noise characteristics of an ISO 100 shot (or something close) rather 1600? If so, does the relationship stay linear as one moves up in base ISO? For example, can you push an ISO 800 shot by say 3 stops in post and come out less noisy than a native 6400 shot? I am sure there is a point of diminishing returns and limits in practical application, any idea where those limits are?
On an ideal sensor an ISO 100 shot pushed 4 stops should have the noise characteristics identical to an ISO 1600 shot. The D800 is pretty close in that regard due to the linear increase in its electronic read noise across ISOs, whereas more traditional sensors like the 5DM2/5DM3/D3 have non-linear increases in noise, making them perform better at Higher ISOs vs a Lower ISO image that's entirely pushed in post. Every sensor has an ISO level at which any increases in ISO produce no benefit vs underexposing at a lower ISO and pushing in post. This level is much lower on the D800 but defining it precisely depends on whether one is interested in the purely technical aspect of analog vs PP/digital gain or instead interested in the practical applications. The lower the ISO you can use and push with acceptable results, the more dynamic range you'll have available for your images.
Even with an ideal sensor there are potential pitfalls in pushing. One is posterization, which can occur because the encoding of shadows in the digital realm uses less precision than the midtones and highlights. In practice however it works out that the level of noise in the shadows (even as low as it is on the D800) is about balanced with the precision necessary to represent its tonality, so even after pushing there isn't much posterization. This was my experience with the D7000 but I need to repeat the experiments with the D800 to be sure nothing has changed.
Another pitfall is color/hue shifts, which generally occur because the color translations performed by many raw processors (such as ACR/LR) order their exposure adjustments before or after color application within their raw processing pipelines. I haven't seen much evidence of this on the D800 but I'm at the early stages of analyzing it, plus I don't do much skintone work so any shifts aren't as bothersome to me anyway.
I'm still in the early throws of figuring out the best base ISO to use for the D800, both in terms of any potential posterization but also because there is still some non-linearility in the D800's ISO gain. Right now I'm using ISO 100 because it yields the most latitude (DR) but it may turn out that ISO 200 or 400 have slight noise advantages (or perhaps even one of the intermediate ISOs in between).
