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Taking quality photos under poor lighting conditions is a common problem faced by amateur photographers.  I wrote the following article for an exclusive article directory, but since it is my work, I thought it deserved a place on my blog as well.  Kind of a one stop shopping sort of thing.  I hope you find this discussion of low light photography, enlightening.

How to Take Good Low Light Pictures

Many would be photographers go out and get a pro-sumer digital SLR camera like the Nikon D90 with the idea that they will be able to take nice pictures of, among other things, their son’s high school football games. I use the high school football example because it represents nearly a worst case scenario for low light pictures; fast action under low light. Depending on your equipment there are several ways to skin this proverbial cat, however I’m going to address what I believe to be the most likely circumstances.

The primary obstacle to getting good photos in low light is that low light typically requires a slower shutter speed. If your shutter speed is too slow, you get blurry photos. To capture the action and still allow for a slight motion blur, I typically shoot for about 1/250th of a second shutter speed or faster. One side note here: Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) and Canon’s Image Stabilization (IS) lenses are said to ‘give you’ two to three stops and allow you to use to use slower shutter speeds in low light. This is true, but misleading. I often shoot still subjects at 1/30 th or 1/15th of a second with my Nikor 18-200VR lens and get good results. The key here is that my subject is not moving. The VR and IS in these lenses compensate for camera movement, not subject movement. If you shoot a moving subject at 1/15th of a second, your shot will be blurry.

The Situation
The Scenario I am describing assumes that you have a quality digital SLR and atypical zoom lens, which, when at maximum zoom, has an aperature (F-stop) of 5.6. For example my Nikor 18-200VR 3.5-5.6 will shoot as fast as 3.5 if I am not zoomed in, however, at 200mm zoom, the fastest aperture the lens is capable of is 5.6.

1. Forget the Flash
Certainly don’t try the built in flash, as it only has a range of about sixteen feet. If you are right on the sidelines (you should be) you may be able to get away with an add on flash like the SB600 or SB800, but I prefer to avoid that as well for a number of reasons.

• The range is still only about 50 feet or so and, at a football game, if you want to capture that interception 100 feet away, there is no time to disable the flash.
• Even if your shot is within range, a flash does not give you the shot you want. It only lights up nearby players, leaving the rest in the dark and providing no sense of the surrounding action.
• Finally, a flash will freeze the action, which causes you lose all sense of motion, ruining the whole sports action feel of the shot.

2. Increase your ISO
You could spend $1000 on an ‘Fast’ F2.8 Lens, which would allow you to shoot 2 full stops faster, however, this too is unnecessary and, in some ways, detrimental to achieving the results you want. The detrimental aspect of a fast lens is the fact that, at F2.8 you lose much of your depth of field. This is certainly desirable for portrait or sports photography, but not always for sports. Similar to the effect of the flash mentioned previously, you lose all of the surrounding action in your photo; only your subject ends up being in focus. In fact, if you are shooting at say 200mm at F2.8, you may even end up with portions of the subjects own body out of focus.

So how, in lieu of spending $1000 for the aforementioned lens, do we get our two stops back allowing us to shoot at 1/250th of a second. We crank up the ISO. Newer models of digital SLRs are getting better and better as far as minimizing Noise at High ISO settings. The bottom line is, you can live with, or even remove image noise and have a good photo, but if your shutter speed is too slow and the image is blurry, you may as well just throw it away. You can’t fix stupid with Photoshop. You can increase the ISO on many cameras up to 3200, and some can go up to 6400.

3. Shoot Raw
I can’t think of a digital SLR that doesn’t allow you to shoot in RAW format. For normal photography under decent light, RAW just adds an extra step to my processing, however, for low light shots, the extra step is worth it. Shooting in RAW format produces an unprocessed digital negative, much like unprocessed film. Just like film can be ‘pushed’ a stop or two to lighten the resulting images, RAW gives you the digital data needed to ‘pull’ about two more stops out of your digital images. This allows you to take photos which, though they may look a little dark, can be recovered in post processing. Most cameras come with a RAW image converter, but I like the Adobe RAW plugin the best.

On the topic of Adobe RAW, I would like to throw in one quick tip that primarily benefits Mac users. As you may know, Adobe offers Photoshop (expensive) and Photoshop Elements for both the PC and the Mac. The full version of Photoshop comes with Adobe Bridge image management and a very full featured RAW converter whether you are using a Mac or a PC. Photoshop Elements, on the other hand, differs from PC to Mac.

The PC version of Elements has a built in image manager and offers a scaled down version of Adobe Raw. The Mac version of Elements, however does not have a built in image manager. Instead, Adobe ships it with the full version of Adobe Bridge AND the Full featured version of Adobe RAW. It is important to note, that the Mac version of Elements itself does contain the scaled down version of Adobe RAW, and it will use this version if you open a RAW image from within Elements. Instead, open the image from within Adobe Bridge and you will be accessing the full featured version.
4. Use Noise Reduction Software
I cast, but not least, if you feel that there is a little bit too much noise in your finished product, plugins like Noise Ninja or Neat Image do an excellent job (better than Photoshop’s built in function) at reducing image noise with minimal impact on image sharpness.

So don’t beat yourself up because you spent $1500 on that great SLR and somehow still can’t seem to get good low light shots. That’s why they call us amateurs. If you follow the above guidelines, however, you should be able to get some pretty nice photos without having to go out and spend another $1000 for a ‘sports’ lens. Falls and football season is coming up. If you manage to get some good shots using the above techniques, I’d love to see them.

What is Image Noise
Image noise is something every photographer should be conscious of.
It is defined as the arbitrary variation of brightness or color data in images produced by the sensor and circuitry of a scanning device or digital camera and is regarded as an unwanted by-product of image capture. The quality of the circuitry definitely plays a part in noise reduction and cheaper cameras typically produce more noise than more expensive SLRs in low light situations. When taking pictures with a digital SLR camera, image noise is most commonly caused by utilizing a high ISO setting, especially those over ISO 800, though this varies by model. Image noise manifests as noticeable artifacts that degrade image quality. Image noise comes in two flavors; luminance (grayscale) noise, which makes an image look grainy, and chroma (color) noise, which is generally noticeable as coloured artifacts in the image. When using a scanner, image noise usually happens in the dark parts of images.

Getting Rid of Image Noise
Most image editing packages allow for you to add and decrease noise, as an effect or filter. This works well enough for adding noise, but removing it is a much trickier process which, when applied with simple built in filters causes the image to lose sharpness. Enter Neat Image. Neat Image is a digital filter application specially designed to efficiently reduce visible noise in digital photographic images. Neat Image is provided as a stand alone application, but also as a plug-in for a wide range of image processing applications, like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, Ulead PhotoImpact, PhotoLine32, IrfanView and others. Neat Image reduces the high ISO noise associated with image sensors in digital cameras and scanners, the film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts of over-compressed images, and color banding. Another benefit of noise reduction by Neat Image is that the reduction of noise produces smaller file sizes for JPEG image with the same quality setting generating a file which is about 30% smaller.

Neat Image incorporates the most advanced noise reduction algorithms in the industry that surpass the quality of all classic noise reduction methods and even that of the wavelet-based methods. It provides the most accurate noise reduction currently available. Neat Image uses device noise profiles to make noise reduction custom-tailored to your camera or scanner model, making it the the most accurate noice reducer available. It offers premium noise reduction and image sharpening utilizing an advanced noise filter to reduce noise and grain in digital images. The professional editions of Neat Image fully even support 48-bit RGB and 16-bit grayscale images.
No Noise Dude
Saving Money with Neat Image
As we’ve already discussed, Neat Image does noise reduction best, but why do you need or want it. Well, if you have any modern hand held point and shoot, you’ll love what it can do to improve your low light images. But what if you already have a nice Digital SLR? This is where you can save a little money with neat image. When it starts to get dark out (think football game) you have a few choices if you want to capture sharp images. You can get up close with a flash, but this really freezes action and eliminates the opportunity for desirable motion blur. You can spend $900 (minimum) for a fast lens, like an F2.8 zoom but, apart from being cost prohibitive for many of us, this low f-stop also dramatically reduces the depth of field of your image so that only your immediate subject is in focus, which may also be undesirable. The alternative is to use a good variable zoom lens at say F 5.6 and shoot at a higher iso setting. This does cause image noise, but for $75 or less depending on the version you buy, you can clean up the noise without losing sharpness and leave the $900 in the bank.  To get your own copy, check out Neat Images website at http://www.neatimage.com where you can download the demo version for free.

Graphics Design Defined

When considering the question, “what is graphics design” I’m reminded of the movie Groundhog Day, where the camera man tells a would be female companion, “you know, people think I just take a camera and point it at stuff, but there’s a lot more to it than that.” The same goes for graphic design. Take a look at the video these guys put together. I can’t say that I’m excited about their choice of background music, but the meat is there anyway. Good job dude.