Rudy Pohl
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 R5's ISO-Invariance - a happy discovery for shooting Owls at dawn and dusk | |
Last evening I was out with my R5 photographing a local Barred Owl at sunset and shortly afterwards, something which I usually do at dawn. My camera's light meter called for an ISO value of 25,600 which I set as required. I took multiple shots with the e-shutter in short bursts.
When I got home and viewed my images I noticed that for some strange reason the camera had automatically set itself to ISO 1000 for two shots in the middle of an ISO 25,600 burst. Out of curiosity I decided to try to process one of the images despite the fact that the RAW file was so dark I couldn't discern a thing.
When I boosted the exposure 4.5 stops in Adobe Camera Raw and raised the shadows 50% I was shocked to see how good this image was. I then used Photoshop's new AI Denoise Enhanced feature which did a great job, plus I did some colour processing and tweaking and was pleased enough with the result that I posted it.
Then I tried doing the same things with the very next image in the burst sequence which was shot at ISO 25,600. The result was so terrible that the image was unusable! The excessive high-ISO noise shredded all the fine details, washed out the colours, and reduced the dynamic range to the point where the image was an awful mess. I would never post such an image.
This morning, I went out in my back yard at sunrise to try to do the same thing. In order to see the scenes I was shooting at 4-5 stops underexposed and to assist in focusing I disabled the Exposure Simulation in the EVF and everything worked great.
Conclusion:
It seems that with the R5 it's better to rely on the sensor's ISO-Invariance property and underexpose the image in camera and then restore it in post, than to use the high ISO levels indicated by the camera's meter.
I'm very happy about this serendipitous discovery because I spend a lot of time throughout the year in dimly lit forests photographing and video recording Owls.
Hope this might be helpful to some folks.
Rudy
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