I like nothing better than candid shots of people around the fire at the cottage. To get the best shots, no flash works or else everyone gets all excited and dodges the shots. For that kind of thing, with an 85L at iso 3200 I am shooting at 1/20th at best so yea, I would love more headroom on the high iso side for that.
Well this was educational. I don't shoot sports, wildlife, low light bars, or weddings. Those are all areas associated with hired work, which I don't do. So I guess I'm in no position to need high iso
In fact, I think DSLR makers should develop better mirror slap vibration technology and market it I mean, I buy a 5D2, gain usable high ISO stops, only to lose them by mirror slap!
Street photography at night/evening. I prefer having some leeway with my exposures as opposed to being forced to use my largest aperture and slowest (hand-holdable) shutter speed.
Weddings can be very dark and it's preferable not to use flash during the ceremony. Receptions can be even darker, and high-ISO makes your flash effectively more powerful, resulting is faster recycle, longer battery life, ability to bounce from farther, etc.
It's a mixed bag for me, but I shoot a lot of indoors, available light shots, and dusk/dawn handheld. It's a style I like, and better high iso opens up a huge number of new possibilities.
Just to put into perspective how far digital technology has progressed: I shot film for about 25 years before moving to digital. The slide film of choice was Kodachrome, with an ASA of 25, followed by "high-speed" Kodachrome ASA 64. Then Fuji introduced Velvia, with an ASA of 50, which was sharper and more saturated than the Kodachromes and it became the film of choice. It was so saturated that many photographers shot it at ASA 32, to over saturate it slightly. Of course we only used manual SLR's with prime lenses.
Allan Bruce wrote:
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I think you have misunderstood some information somewhere down the line. If a camera supports a native ISO of 6400 then taking a shot at ISO 6400 will have a far greater DR than a pushed one at ISO 1600 regardless of whether the shot is in RAW or jpeg.
Noise is the limiting factor for DR at high ISO. Noise at ISO 1600 is already tens of raw levels, so the coarser digitization of the data at lower ISO has no effect. Noise relative to signal saturates at ISO 1600 in all Canons I've ever seen tested. For instance, here's a 1D3:
The sensor read noise in photon equivalents flattens out at ISO 1600 and doesn't drop thereafter. This means that increasing the ISO does essentially nothing to improve S/N beyond 1600, while increasing the ISO removes a stop of highlight headroom for every stop increase in ISO. The only advantage to increasing ISO beyond 1600 may arise for some cameras like the 5D2 that have substantial banding noise in shadows, and then only until the last ISO that is implemented as a hardware gain in the camera electronics. ISO gains that are implemented in firmware as a post-digitization multiplication of the RAW data (such as ISO6400 on the 1D3) are essentially worthless for RAW shooting -- all they do is remove highlight headroom without any compensating increase in S/N in the RAW data.
The upshot is that underexposing at ISO 1600 and pushing during RAW conversion has no detriment in terms of noise (apart from issues with shadow banding in cameras with poorly implemented electronics such as the 5D2; not an issue with the 1 series), and has the advantage of maintaining highlight headroom for better DR in highlights.
All the above comments apply to RAW. Jpeg is a different story, since then one has to set the exposure to fit within the limited DR window available in the 8-bit, gamma-corrected RGB format of JPEG.
ejmartin wrote:
Noise is the limiting factor for DR at high ISO. Noise at ISO 1600 is already tens of raw levels, so the coarser digitization of the data at lower ISO has no effect. Noise relative to signal saturates at ISO 1600 in all Canons I've ever seen tested. For instance, here's a 1D3:
The sensor read noise in photon equivalents flattens out at ISO 1600 and doesn't drop thereafter. This means that increasing the ISO does essentially nothing to improve S/N beyond 1600, while increasing the ISO removes a stop of highlight headroom for every stop increase in ISO. The only advantage to increasing ISO beyond 1600 may arise for some cameras like the 5D2 that have substantial banding noise in shadows, and then only until the last ISO that is implemented as a hardware gain in the camera electronics. ISO gains that are implemented in firmware as a post-digitization multiplication of the RAW data (such as ISO6400 on the 1D3) are essentially worthless for RAW shooting -- all they do is remove highlight headroom without any compensating increase in S/N in the RAW data. ...Show more →
I'm usually at 100 outdoors or at the other end of the spectrum, trying to squeeze the most out of poor indoor conditions shooting people with available light and fast primes. I got decent results at a corporate Christmas party shooting 6400 all night with the 5D2.
concerts. 3 songs, no flash, very difficult (and constantly shifting) lights.
I shoot for the campus paper, so I'll be branching into poorly lit student government meetings and sports in poor-to-decently lit gyms.
I use ISO 1600 and above regularly and with a bit of careful NeatImage+ in post processing the results print very nicely at A1. I regularly shoot sport and motorsport in very low light.
I mean, I buy a 5D2, gain usable high ISO stops, only to lose them by mirror slap!