When all Else Fails – high ISO, slow shutter
No sooner had I completed my post yesterday, “Practical Guide for Youth Soccer Photography – Part B“ I had to go and shoot my son’s soccer game in the rain! To make matters worse, I left my f/2.8 lens at home – maybe it was subconscious so I would have something to write about today! The game started in reasonable enough light, my exposure was 1/800s, f/4.5, ISO 400 and shooting RAW images. Not the best light but good enough. As the second half started, the dark clouds started billowing in. I upped the ISO to 640 for a few minutes, then 800. The skies continued to darken and my shots were very underexposed.
Desperate times call for desperate measures! I dropped the shutter speed to 1/500s and turned “on” the ultrasonic stabilization in “Mode 2″ (the mode that works with panning) and kept shooting. The light still continued to decline and the rain started to fall. I covered my head and camera with my rain jacket, set the ISO at 1000 and kept shooting. As the rain got harder, I had no choice but to go to ISO 1600 and see what came out! Here is one of the last shots I took, 1/500s, f/5.6, ISO 1600, stabilization “on” in “mode 2″ on a monopod, under a rain jacket:
(click to see the full size image)
This is basically the RAW photo converted to JPG with “in camera” settings. No corrections, sharpening or noise reduction performed. I am not sure why I was leaning! There was a time at the end of the game where I was trying to avoid a puddle and could not pan a full 90o.
Open the full size image and take a look at the noise in the players’ faces, jerseys and the trees in the background. You can see streaks of rain too. After fixing the rotation, cropping and doing color and tonal correction, I ended up with:
(click to see full size image)
The above processing was performed in Adobe’s Lightroom 2 and took all of 1 minute to complete. Given the harsh conditions, miserable lighting, and rain, I didn’t expect much better. The photo does convey the conditions – except for that pesky noise. So, I used my secret “high ISO” weapon - Noise Ninja, setup as an external Lightroom editor. Noise Ninja is almost amazing in its ability to recover noisy photos. I just did a “quick and dirty” in NJ using its default settings. This took another 30 seconds. Here is the final result:
(click to see full size image)
Given the conditions (and realize this photo is not getting printed at high resolution), I think the results are pretty good.