Hey all Went out to do a touch of Vulcan spotting yesterday (zomg, what an amazing machine) - hoped to get some decent photos but was left massively disappointed. I screwed up camera settings - left the camera in TV mode but set at 1/125ths and iso 320 (which were residual from the previous nights shooting a light show). As it was reasonably light (and the backdrop was a white/cloudy sky) this ended up pushing F29-32 for the vast majority of the pictures. Basically, ALL the images are noisy as hell - horrifically noisy. I'm thinking this was just down to the aperture (F29 -> 32) for most of the pictures but after a little testing yesterday afternoon, the IQ wasn't that bad using similar settings so it's got me doubting a little! The weather was slightly foggy - not sure if that would cause a noisy image though? An example image is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByfiA8LgyX4oakhuMjBqSlZndms/view?usp=sharing I'd like if possible to figure out the cause as (all being well) I'll get one last opportunity to take some pictures of her in the air later this month... Setup: Canon 7D - AI Servo, High speed shooting. 100-400L IS mode 1 Thanks in advance for any comments/advice/input anyone may have!
f/29...hawt dayum! High aperture won't cause noise, but it will cause diffraction blur (which it most certainly has in your image). And yes, fog can cause image noise depending on the settings you use - higher shutter speeds capture the texture of the fog which can result in image noise. Looking at the image in PS I can see that the fog has killed the contrast as well. Sadly there's not much you can do about fog crashing your party!
Thanks very much for the info and for checking - definitely lessons learnt - shame it was on such a rare beast! Do you recon there's any chance anything could be recovered from that pic or is it pretty much beyond anything decent in it's current for? (i.e someone with 1337 photoshop skillz )
I read somewhere that you shouldn't go higher than f/16 on any lens because of diffraction. As for Photoshop; you might want to send a PM to stonedsurd as aircraft are his jam. Sending the RAW file would be a must as cleaning a JPEG, while not impossible, ain't great.
Nope unfortunately not. Settings were pretty much totally wrong (including not setting permanent jpg+raw). Huge lessons learnt - from the entire day
PM'd you a link. Gave it a tickle in Camera RAW, something you can use even with non-RAW files. It's not much but better than nothing.
I was sat at the computer twiddling my thumbs so had a play with the original image. Noise reduction and sharpness were applied but didn't do that much but every little bit helps. Colour was increased and contrast adjustments to bring out some detail. As the sky was flat I applied a border just to make it more interesting. It's not to everyone's taste I'm sure but I think it's got a bit more pop than the original. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7hry_Q_Mc3iLTRVUWxGcjUteG8/view
