Disappointed with noise levels....

Tigh Mor is a former castle and hotel which is now owned by the Holiday Property Bond.

I was lucky enough to stay here last night and headed out in the dark armed with camera and tripod. I'm pretty un-impressed, and surprised, with the noise levels. I shot it at ISO400, but what i see here is levels of noise that i'd normally associate with at least ISO800. Should i have shot at a lesser sensitivity setting? I've shot low light before and not noticed anything near this bad.

Tigh Mor at night



Noise!!!

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Pentax K20D, Pentax 18-55mm II, Pentax M 50mm 1: 1.7, Super Paragon 1: 2.8 24mm Macro, Pentax smc DA 50-200 mm F4-5.6 ED
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Hi, not able to help with the noise issue, noise in such low light seems hard to avoid.

What are the advantages to increasing iso, when on a tripod why not keep to lower iso?

thanks

Fraser

As Fraser says; why not increase the Aperture a few stops or lenghen the shutter speed to 60 seconds? either way you could have lowered the ISO.

Davex.

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K5 + 8mm-500mm zooms and primes
Please feel free to play with any images I post.
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higher ISO meant i could do a shorter exposure...

I did try and take a shot with ISO100 but the file came out way under-exposed.

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Pentax K20D, Pentax 18-55mm II, Pentax M 50mm 1: 1.7, Super Paragon 1: 2.8 24mm Macro, Pentax smc DA 50-200 mm F4-5.6 ED
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do i not need to shoot in Bulb mode to get a 60 second exposure? I had gone out without my cable and don't know if i'm able to lock the exposure open for any more than 30 seconds????

If i can learn from this, it'll be much appreciated.

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Pentax K20D, Pentax 18-55mm II, Pentax M 50mm 1: 1.7, Super Paragon 1: 2.8 24mm Macro, Pentax smc DA 50-200 mm F4-5.6 ED
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Yes you do, according to the exif you where at f14? (seems slightly odd in itself) however had you set your aperture to f8 a 30 second exposure ' ISO200 should have been ok

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K5 + 8mm-500mm zooms and primes
Please feel free to play with any images I post.
My flickr: link

Did you try it in av mode? Suspect you can't set a 60sec exposure manually, but the camera can be 'tricked' into doing it. Try it with the lens cap on. I might well be wrong!

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[link=https://500px.com/will_brealey/[/link]

why is f14 odd?

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Pentax K20D, Pentax 18-55mm II, Pentax M 50mm 1: 1.7, Super Paragon 1: 2.8 24mm Macro, Pentax smc DA 50-200 mm F4-5.6 ED
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very small aperture, not letting much light through which is not what you want for night photography.

The benefits of smaller apertures up to about f11 are wider depth of field which helps ensuring sharpness in landscape shots but beyond this there are typically negative consequences.

Is your image an 'out of the camera' JPG, or a processed .PEF/DNG file?

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Peter E Smith

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I have only used the K10D and K7 and i have never experienced such high levels of noise in my thousands of night shots. Do yo have the long exposure noise reduction switched on? (If you have that choice on the K20D)
My own night shots are taken at ISO100 or 200 and generally i begin taking shots whilst there is still some colour in the sky. Usually i begin at 15 or 20 seconds at between F16-F22, gradually increasing the exposure time to 30 secs and widening the aperture to around F11 until the sky becomes too dark. Very occasionally i might use an exposure of several minutes if i am using a 1m Candlepower torch as illumination for the subject.
Regards - Pete

It's not odd but not needed in with this photo since the only focus point is the castle.
Here play with this a bit link
With f/11 at 18mm you can get 1.87m in front of you till the horizon in focus, a bit over kill in this shot.
Even with f/5.6 you can get 2.57 meter till the horizon in focus so you could easily have shot this shot with ISO100.

Besides that the noise is there most likely because the sky is one flat surface, it does not show up for example in the building since you've other things going on there, with a decent noise reduction program you can clean the noise quite a lot.

Here what do you think?

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Stefan


K10D, K5
DA* 16-50, DA* 50-135, D-FA 100 Macro, DA 40 Ltd, DA 18-55
AF-540FGZ

Most people know that high ISO = noise although looking at Huw's interior shots today, that's becoming less of an issue. Sadly long exposures, regardless of ISO are also plagued by noise often of an unpleasant variety. You can get rid of it using software but almost inevitably at the expense of detail.

Stefan's effort is about as good as it gets, I think.

Regards,

Andrew

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Best wishes,

Andrew

"These places mean something and it's the job of a photographer to figure-out what the hell it is."
Robert Adams
"The camera doesn't make a bit of difference.  All of them can record what you are seeing.  But, you have to SEE."
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You could have used multiple exposure. It would have helped with the noise issue. Each exposure would have been shorter, but the combined total time would more or less have been the same.

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Yves (another one of those crazy Canucks)

You could make them from even length and "mean" out the noise, that's very effective.

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Stefan


K10D, K5
DA* 16-50, DA* 50-135, D-FA 100 Macro, DA 40 Ltd, DA 18-55
AF-540FGZ