How does your Nikon perform at high ISOS?
Should you be scared of high ISOS? Discover just what your own camera is capable of to achieve better images
Many photographers are scared of noise, and deliberately avoid using high ISO settings. It doesn’t help that camera reviewers often draw attention to noise as a way of assessing and distinguishing between cameras, sometimes giving it more importance than it deserves. Not only that, there is a degree of personal taste involved, and what one photographer perceives as ‘unacceptable’ levels of noise, another might find perfectly tolerable. This little exercise helps you find out for yourself which settings you think give acceptable results with your own Nikon.
1 Set up a still life near a window indoors in daylight. Pick a subject with a good range of colours and good fine detail, because this will show up the differences more clearly. We used some scattered liquorice allsorts for our test shot.
Put your camera on a tripod – this will rule out any camera
2 shake. Then take a series of shots at all the full ISO steps offered by your camera, from ISO100 right up to whatever your particular Nikon’s maximum ISO setting might be.
3 Look at your shots carefully on your computer, zooming in at 100% magnification to look at the grain in each one. At what ISO setting does this start to look unacceptable?
4 Check your Shooting menu to see what settings have been used for High ISO Noise Reduction. Try changing these to see what effect it has on the results. Some people prefer their photographs with less noise, even if it means the images also have some smoothed-over detail, while other photographers prefer their images to be as sharp as possible, even if that means they’re also a little noisy.