I shot the Nike Indoor National High School T&F Championships two weekends ago and the lighting was horrible. Decided to push the 1d Mark 3 to ISO 6400 to see if it could hold up. I was pretty happy with the results. NoiseNinja and resizing applied:
If it's exposed properly and you catch it during the right part of the light cycle, I kid you not, it rivals the old ISO 800 on the Mark II. I'm hearing that the D3 is even a tad better.
Chris, the image that is displayed here was processed by me the way I might process an image. The link to the "Noise Ninja" image is in fact the original image with ONLY NN applied, no other touches. You'll see the color actually is muted, not emphasized. This is normal, as noise reduction tends to blur color channels (not RGB, but rather A/B channels in a LAB mode)
That aint the half of it. 6400 is about the worst that the images in a mk3 can get. I love using Hilight Tone Priority. It adds a touch of detail in the highlights that I couldn't get before without really shooting a bit darker than I like to. This comes in handy in several situations
1) When I shoot basketball, sometimes you get a really dark skinned athlete, and they got on a bright white jersey. The dynamic range is difficult. You either shoot for the highlights and hope they're not too dark, or you shoot to expose them and pray the jerseys don't go nuclear. With HTP on, you can shoot up to about 2/3 stop and retain highlights BETTER than without it at 2/3 under. That's HUGE.
2) Baseball shots where you try to get faces under the caps. If that guy is dark skinned, and wears a white jersey, AND has a cap with sunlight directly overhead, you are totally screwed. Shade to Sun in AZ is at least a 4 stop difference. Shooting for the faces means everyone looks like they just came from Chernobyl. Shoot for the jersey and all you see under that cap is eyes, which is just spooky.
Ive almost NEVER turned off Highlight Tone Priority, and I regularly shoot NBA stuff at 1/640th 2.8 ISO 2000. I also don't use High ISO Noise Reduction. The images look very good.
Here is the original image with no NoiseNinja. Sorry for the delay. I chose this picture for some of the reasons PShizzy mentioned - dark skinned athlete, bright white elements, etc., but I did not use highlight tone priority for this photo. Now that I've read PShizzy's findings, I wish I had.
these shots are great. I dont have my images on my laptop, but i shoot in pretty harsh conditions here for volleyball (ISO 6400, 2.8, 1/320th) and I am going to look into HTP for sure, thanks Max.
Nill : depends on the camera, but for your purposes. YEAH THE AF BLOWS
