{"id":1875,"date":"2012-08-20T09:10:28","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T14:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/?p=1875"},"modified":"2012-08-20T09:10:28","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T14:10:28","slug":"low-light-shooting-with-the-nikon-d800","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/?p=1875","title":{"rendered":"Low Light Shooting With the Nikon D800"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> \"\"\"\"<\/a>\"\" I hope you\u2019ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture<\/a>\"\" and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting<\/a>\"\". I hope you\u2019ll get copies if you haven\u2019t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is to sell the book and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com:<\/span><\/span> An Introduction to Photographic Lighting<\/span><\/span><\/a>, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio,<\/a> Getting Started in Commercial Photography<\/a> If you\u2019re in the Indianapolis area there are other opportunities as well. I\u2019ll be giving a Photomicrography presentation on August 23 at Black Dog Books in Zionsville. Call 317.733.1747<\/span><\/span> to reserve a space. I\u2019ll be teaching a class in commercial photography next spring at Ivy Tech.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of the biggest changes, for me, in working with the Nikon D800 is that the camera works in low light. My previous camera couldn\u2019t make a good file above ISO 160 (yes 160, not 1600) and had trouble with exposures longer than about 1 second. The D800 will make a very usable file at ISO 6400, which is 6 stops brighter than my other camera. It will also make a good shot at an exposure of 30 seconds.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I always tell my students to test and practice, which is exactly what I\u2019ve done with the D800. I made a test of film speed by shooting a five-dollar bill with different ISO settings. Money has a lot of finely printed detail, so I like to use it to look at resolution and noise. My evaluation of the test was that the camera worked exceptionally well to ISO 800, and had little noise at even higher ISO settings. I also discovered that long exposures were excellent, but take the camera considerably longer to process. Please \"\"<\/a>note, these are my evaluations for the way I shoot, you should make your own tests and evaluations rather than accept my results. Besides testing is good practice.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I went back to the Indiana State Fair at night for some testing and practice in low light. I really haven\u2019t done this kind of shooting in a long time, and I had forgotten how much fun it can be. As you may have figured out all the shots in this \"\"<\/a>blog entry are from the night shoot at the fair. I did all my shooting at ISO 1600. I was very interested in allowing some motion blur into my shots. I shot everything in RAW. I was generally pleased by the auto-exposure and auto-color choices the camera made, but there were exceptions. The camera occasionally wanted to make things brighter, and often a little greener, than they felt at the site. It was easy to correct this when I converted from RAW to JPG, but I wouldn\u2019t want to do this kind of shooting without making RAW files.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I should probably do some more night shooting soon. First because it\u2019s fun, but also because I could use a little more practice.
\n <\/span><\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest changes, for me, in working with the Nikon D800 is that the camera works in low light. My previous camera couldn\u2019t make a good file above ISO 160 (yes 160, not 1600).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1875"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1898,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions\/1898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}