D300

Ahhhh the smell of a new camera :)
Finally Nikon owners can rejoice in lower ISO noise!
One of my all time favorite shots of my friend Terry's wedding is so full of noise, it's practically unusable. Sure it was Nikon D70, but the Canon users at the time would have probably pulled off the shot with lower noise.
Then I get a D200 and still...noise noise noise..come on Nikon!

Now (cue goofy Angelic music) the venerable D300 comes of age and is now ripping through scenes with a totally usable iso 6400! Nuts I tells ya!

Check this out. Once again I've used my military training to deftly low crawl upon my African hunting dog. Even while sleeping his nose is constantly sniffing for predators, prey or crumbs. I raise my optical weapon and began firing shoots right up his nostrils. The deadly hunter never flinched as I peered my 50mm 1.4 right up his flaring snore hole. I quickly rip off two important shots. One at iso 250, the next at iso 6400.

Here's the 100% crops of his left eyebrow.

ISO 250:
ISO6400:

ISO6400 with medium amount of Noise Ninja applied:


Here's a squished version of the full image at iso250:

Squished version of iso6400:

Squished version of iso6400 with a medium amount of Noise Ninja:
Hmmm not too bad huh? I still need to fire a few iso6400 off to the printer to see how they look. In comparison to my D200 it's a HUGE improvement! You can see details even at iso6400, even better with Noise ninja. although the images look just a bit water colored, slightly desaturated and soft. In my view totally acceptable, especially for the all important shot! there are some more tricks to clear out noise. I'll give them a try and see if I cant pull even more quality out of the image. Oh and I used Bibble Pro to process the RAWs as Lightroom has an aneurism with RAWs at iso6400. Hope Adobe fixes that soon!

Later
-Mark