What was the power level involved in this shot? Well it wasn’t just over 9000, it was over 400% of that. This shot is brought to you by an early morning volunteer shift and the Z6’s ability to shoot incredibly usable images at ISO 40,000.
I’ll do something I don’t normally do: here’s the full res.
Is it clean? No. Not even close. There’s noise in there and no amount of reduction is going to get rid of it. Is it bad? Hell no. Actually, it reminds me a lot of Fuji Superia 1600, except it’s actually got some resolution and sharpness. And while I know it’s not common in the digital age, I had no problem shooting paid gigs with Superia back in the day.
Furthermore, at any kind of normal viewing resolution, you’d really never know how noisy it is. Scaled down to 800px on the long edge up above, you probably didn’t even know it was a high ISO image. Printed at 16×24? Well, I haven’t done it with this particular image, but I guarantee there’d be no noise complaints on that end either.
That being said, this is a very modern sensor doing some very modern things. My d700 lived at ISO 1600, and I wouldn’t be afraid to push to 6400. But 12k? That was gnarly, and not in a good way. Your Olympus micro 4/3rds camera? Yeah. Not a chance.
So how does it end up looking this good? Two things:
- The light is good. Actually, the light is great. That’s the whole reason I lug the 400/2.8 out on my morning volunteer shifts. The morning light in the mile high city is about as good as it gets. If I was shooting at ISO 40,000 in hopes of getting 1/20th of a second or something in a near black situation with a dark background, yeah it’d be garbage.
- The editing. In that close up, you’re going to see a lot of luminance noise. What you don’t see a lot of is chroma, or color, noise. That’s because in lightroom you can – with one move of a slider, turn all that ugly digital color noise into regular luminance noise. Then? Don’t even touch the luminance noise slider. The instant you do, you lose the character, you lose the detail, and it all becomes a melty plastic mess.
The Zootographer 
