CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

The 'Desi Braveheart' Dancers - image shot at 3200 ISO Last weekend we visited the Edinburgh Mela, an international music, dance and arts festival celebrating its 20th year.   There were three stages where musicians and dances from all over the world came to perform and while the stages were lit, the lighting was going to be a challenge for the X-T1 with the 55-200mm f3.5/4.8 telephoto that I was going to have to use to get some close up shots of the artists.  I did take the 35mm f1.4, which would've given me a 3.5 stop advantage over the f4.8 at the 200mm end of the zoom but I wasn't able to get close enough to the stage to use the shorter lens.   Of course the 55-200mm has Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) but this only helps if the subject is static or slow moving.  I've handheld a shot of the Eiffel Tower at night using 1/8s with this lens and got a perfectly sharp image, but 1/8s is no good with dancers as they will appear blurred even with OIS enabled...

All digital cameras have sensors that can be set by the user for sensitivity using a setting called ISO.  The higher the number the higher the sensitivity to light which means a photographer can take pictures in lower light. The trade off is what is referred to 'noise' in the image, artefacts that, in the days of film, was referred to 'grain'.  This has the effect of lowering the quality of the image.  On the flip side of this particular coin, the lower the ISO number, the less noise and the better quality final image. The test subject - a 1:36 scale Mini Miglia Corgi model The way a camera handles 'noise' is also dependent on a number of factors. The first being the size of the sensor and the number of pixels that is packed onto that sensor.  For example a mobile phone cameras sensor or simple digital point and shoot are tiny compared to normal cameras.  Manufacturers pack millions of pixels onto these tiny sensors but the downside is the ...