Extreme HIGH ISO photography tricks. Whatever you do, don't do THIS!

hey everyone and welcome to a new video do you have problems shooting in challenging lighting conditions like too dark too bright back lit dark shade or full sun if so join the club I recently went to Kenya for a photo Safari and had to face brutal lighting conditions in this part one video I'll show you some images that I got on that trip in conditions that were really low light in pre-dawn and after Sunset the strategies I use to get them and some processing tricks to make them look their best like this photo shot at 115th of a second and at ISO 3200 in a second video part two of this series I'll show you how I handled conditions that were too bright and my processing secret to turn this hazy Overexposed photo into this stay for my bonus tip where I show you why this photo shot at ISO 12,800 with no processing doesn't appear to have that much noise and how I managed to get it my name is Sim D and I'm a professional nature and wfe photographer living in Eastern Canada I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for nature photography subscribe if you want to see more you'll [Music] be so in February I went to Kenya and the experience was nothing short of amazing great people great scenery and great Wildlife but the photographic conditions there were very challenging including very low light the hot mid midday Sun often makes Wildlife inactive during the day so really early and really late are the best times to find action especially big cats like lions cheetahs and leopards I'm used to living in Eastern Canada where most of the year the sun comes up at an angle and takes a couple of hours to get harsh whereas in Kenya the sun rises straight up and gets super harsh in no time making the window of Perfect Light very small it seems It's always too dark or too bright this part one video will focus on C SC arios that are too dark let's start off in the pre-dawn my first advice is to get on site for Action before the sun rises that's because the sweet spot of the golden hour just after Sunrise is short and you don't want to waste any of it driving to where the action is as such my guides and I would leave 30 minutes before Sunrise to get on location but what if we found something Before Sunrise do we sit around waiting for the sun to come up not at all when I have a subject I shoot but how do we get photos of wildlife in the pre-dawn that are worth taking my first technique is a purposeful spray and prey yes that's right I said it don't let anyone tell you it's a bad photography technique and I'll tell you why first off it's not like Landscapes or Milky Way Photography where you can set up a tripod and shoot five or 10 seconds if needed or in a studio where we can just add some flash our subjects like big cats even if lazy are still moving and we can't add light the Big Challenge here here is getting enough Shutter Speed without our ISO going too high and our images being so noisy as to be unusable the first variable to get right in lowl light photography is our aperture in low light we need all the light we can get onto our sensor so use lenses with wide apertures like the 70 to2 200 f2.8 or for longer lenses like my 600 mm lens I'm going to shoot it wide open at F4 even if you don't own a fast lens open the aperture as much as you can then the iso needs to go high enough to get some shutter speed when the aperture is fixed the higher the iso the higher the shutter speed you're allowed to take in this case at 130th of a second my ISO is still 5,000 which for me is still usable from a noise perspective but when I post a shot of the back of my camera on social media I get comments like isn't your eyeso high I've made whole videos about this but this reflects the advice that many are given that you should always shoot at the lowest ISO like 100 or your B ISO in this case ISO 100 would give me a shutter speed of 2 seconds forget that also forget the guideline that your shutter speed should be one over your focal length so 640th of a second for this shot we're dealing with really really low light here so what's the plan on this young male line in the Masai Mara in the pre-dawn 115th of a second F4 ISO 4000 shoot lots and lots of shots at ridiculously low shutter speeds and hope at least one is sharp the trick is to use good technique though on a vehicle I like using a bean bag which is great put downward pressure with your left hand at the end of the lens barrel and put some eyebrow pressure against the eye cup to stabilize the camera from mirror or shutter vibration at these crazy low shutter speeds using the electronic shutter can be helpful as it eliminates shutter vibration so shoot shoot shoot they're free you only need a handful to be sharp I shot a few hundred shots of this guy as the sky grew brighter most aren't sharp as there was more movement than my pitiful 115th of a second shutter speed could handle but the odd one is indeed sharp enough even if not perfect like this one at 115th of a second and ISO 3200 but with no light on them they look flat what can we do in processing to liven them up first off photos taken in sunlight usually have bright spots from the sunlet areas and shadows from the Shady Parts as such lowering the whites to get more details there and raising the Shadows to find more information in the darker areas is usually a good idea for pre-dawn it's just the opposite that's because the photo is lacking bright spots and shadows as there's no direct light on it just a little glow from The Horizon where the sun will come up soon as such it's lacking contrast so in processing I'm going to add some whites and reduce the Shadows you can accomplish the same thing by adding contrast or making a slight S curve in the tone curve here's a little contrast but be delicate these can really drive up the saturation to a point that it may look unnatural maybe a bit of Vibrance and a little vignette and finally a bit of noise reduction if the noise is bothersome Lightroom has some features built in but I personally use topaz products and topaz denoise actually has a great sharpening slider that works great too and for a final touch brightening the eyes with a bit of exposure and noise reduction returns them to the glossy eyes that we expect to see and voila here's a final product now some purists will say oh and that image was shot at ISO 3200 and only has eight stops of dynamic range what does that matter in this scenario you have three options one getting the shutter speed up to a normal one 1500th of a second let's say where the iso would have been 100,000 by the way two staying home to get more sleep or sit there doing nothing or three get a photo like this maybe not perfect but if I flew Halfway Around the World to get line photos this is much better than the other two options now I can push my ISO to 6,400 or even 12,800 and get usable images but I have a modern full-frame camera if your camera is older or the sensor is smaller it's best to have more reasonable expectations ISO 3200 may be as much as you want to push it but the same technique applies another encounter was this leopard that came out at Sunset and was in the shade it was getting quite dark with my 600 mm lens at F4 the iso was 5,000 or 6,400 at 1 320th of a second which I knew was borderline to get a sharp photo of a walking leopard so I just kept shooting hoping a few would be sharp and the leopard even looked at me perfect and with a bit of processing highlights up Shadows down as before add a bit of saturation noise reduction and sharpening voila pretty good for shooting in the dark when many people would have given up shooting and if you feel like sharing what's your favorite low light photography trick put it in the comments below me and other viewers would love to know okay what else can you do in these really low light situations another technique is to use the brutally low shutter speeds to Artistic effect in Elli we came across some flamingos Before Dawn they were flying around a bit which gave me an idea there wasn't enough light to get sharp flight shots so while waiting for more light I shot flying flamingos at purposefully low shutter speeds this is another one of those shoot shoot shoot situations you only need a few to be decent and unlike cars or helicopters where you can get the whole subject sharp by using slow shutter speeds while panning for wildlife the parts are moving relative to each other so don't expect a whole bird or animal to be tack sharp even with perfect technique getting the body or head sharp may be enough to make something artistic so set your aperture as open as you can in this really low light situation and set your shutter speed at something like 15th or 1/ 100th of a second and the iso at what is needed to get the right exposure then the trick is to try and mimic the movement of the subject in the frame so they don't move around in the viewfinder try to track as accurately as you can and fire tons of exposures most of them won't be sharp and will look like these I find this is hard to do on a bean bag so I was just doing it handheld just keep shooting your autofocus May struggle in this low light that's normal prefocus on something like a tree or a bush at the distance you expect the action and it will speed up your autofocus accuracy and with some luck and technique you'll get a couple that look okay like I said the subject doesn't need to be sharp all over just enough to show what the species is for example let the blur be artistic rather than a mistake now not all low light techniques involve slow shutter speeds sometimes in low light there's some action that you just want to freeze to get the best shot that was the case with these be eaters in samburu Kenya about a dozen of these were flying around and it was the last few minutes of sunset most of the scene was in Shadow but when the birds would land the backlighting through the wings looked great so I asked my guide to position us so that the background was as dark as possible and the sun behind the birds the great thing about these be eaters is they return to the same perch after getting food so every time the be eater left the perch I stayed focused on the branch when the bird would return my guide Newton would count down 3 2 1 and I'd fire off a few shots to catch the outstretched wings for my settings I made my aperture f4.5 just a bit stopped down for a little deeper depth of feeli to get the branch and the bird sharp or two birds if I was lucky enough then I started with my shutter speed at 2500th of a second which was about as low as I could get to get really sharp shots consistently of these flighty birds with a few tries I indeed got the shot I wanted like this one right here after I got it I told my guide now what I need is two of them to land on the branch at the same time voila five minutes later and then a couple of minutes later the sunset and the opportunity was finished it only lasted 15 minutes but I got plenty of great shots in processing I lowered the overall exposure and shadows which were mostly background then I raised the Highlight so that the light through the wings would pop a bit of saturation and noise reduction voila Here's the final image I didn't worry about the dark exposure on the bird's body the wings are the subjects here now for my bonus tip how did I get the shot at ISO 12,800 and even before processing the photo doesn't look that noisy I didn't underexpose and Expos the photo as dark as the scene looked it was actually darker than it appears in the photo but I exposed it a bit brighter a technique called ET or exposed to the right where you place the histogram as far right as you can without clipping the whites for your photo exposure by doing so you get more light onto your sensor leading to less noise that's because High ISO photos actually benefit from exposing brighter with longer shutter speeds and larger apertures and processing darker rather than exposing dark and trying to brighten later A mistake many make which makes the noise look worse some people might try to shoot this shot at a lower ISO like 8000 and under Expose and think that the lower ISO will deliver better results it won't as you can see in this elephant shot it's a busy mess at ISO 8000 far noisier than the previous photo at ISO 12,800 expose the image at a minimum appropriately and even a bit brighter than the scene here's another ISO 8 elephant appropriately exposed and look way cleaner than the underexposed one high ISO is not the creator of noisy images it's low light or a low signal to noise ratio more specifically the high ISO is revealing that your photo has noise in it not making the noise if that was confusing I've made two whole videos to explain the relationship between ISO and noise you can see one of them right here and don't forget to come back for part two of my Kenya trip where I show you how I dealt with bright sunshine and how I turned this photo into this if you thought this video deserving give it a like and YouTube will show it to other photographers who would benefit from learning these low likee photography tricks and I hope you can use these tips to go out and get your own amazing low likee photos even after other photographers would have packed up and gone home I know you can do it

Channel: Simon d'Entremont

Views: 194,112

Keywords: photography, photography tips, photography tutorial, digital photography, photography basics, beginner photography, photo hacks, photography education, digital noise reduction, white balance, color balance photoshop, lightroom, lightroom photo editing, lightroom editing, lightroom classic tutorial, lightroom tutorial, high iso, high iso photography, high iso noise reduction, low light, low light photography, noisy ima, noisy images, noise reduction, night photography

Id: kmgznHtTi78

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024