High ISO and the Nikon D300
 2009 Adult Sectionals - Michigan |
My wife competes in Adult Figure Skating competitions, so this past weekend I had the opportunity to put my D300 to the test in some poor, low light conditions. For any of you who have photographed in an ice rink, you know what I am talking about.
Very few rinks that I’ve been to provide enough light to effectively capture action photos. Also, the light quanity changes as you pan with the skater over the ice. Because of this, I usually shoot in shutter priority mode and set my shutter speed to 1/400.
In the latest rink I was in, this made my camera select an aperture of f/2.8. It was the widest aperture it could get using my Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens. Even so, I still couldn’t get a good exposure, which was understandable considering my ISO was set to its default of 200. I wound up setting my ISO to 3200 and didn’t dare go any higher. Honestly I didn’t think I would get any usable photos at this ISO, but I had no choice. If I didn’t bump it up that high I would’ve been way underexposed. However, this still wasn’t enough light, so I also bumped up the exposure compensation by 1 stop.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how nice the photos looked on my camera’s LCD screen. But, I knew I wouldn’t be convinced of the quality until I started to process these photos later on my iMac. When I finally got the chance to do some RAW conversions, and to run a few photos through my Noiseware plugin in Photoshop CS4, I was amazed. I was able to get usable results on a majority of the photos that I processed.
I don’t plan on shooting at ISO 3200 often, but it sure is nice to know that the option is there should the situation present itself.
To see more examples from the shoot mentioned in this blog entry, please visit the store…
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