Nick Miners Photography

Adobe finally released Light­room 3 today, after an extens­ive beta test­ing period dur­ing which we were shown tan­tal­ising glimpses of the new fea­tures. How­ever, by far the most impress­ive of the added good­ies is the improved noise reduc­tion. I’ve included some examples below.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200

This photo was taken at ISO 3200 on my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, shortly after I bought it, as part of a series of pho­tos of Bor­ough Mar­ket in Lon­don. All the pho­tos in the set were taken at the same ISO, which allowed me to cap­ture much of the activ­ity and goods on sale without hav­ing to use flash.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200 (no noise reduc­tion — 100% crop)

Here is a 100% crop of the same shot with no noise reduc­tion applied (all sliders set to zero); for ISO 3200 it’s pretty good, show­ing off the low-​​light cap­ab­il­it­ies the 5DII is fam­ous for.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200 (after noise reduc­tion — 100% crop)

After apply­ing noise reduc­tion, the chroma noise has all but van­ished, and only a hint of lumin­ance noise remains, with (in my opin­ion) sug­ges­tions of film grain.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200 (after noise reduction)

The full photo, after noise reduc­tion has been applied. It’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence at this size, so here’s an example of an ISO 6400 shot that has been adjus­ted with Light­room 3:

Starry night, ISO 6400, no NR

The chroma noise, even at this smal­ler size, is obvi­ous, espe­cially in the cloud and on the right-​​hand illu­min­ated tree at the bot­tom of the picture.

Starry night, ISO 6400, after NR

The dif­fer­ence here is plain. A huge improve­ment over the original.

I now feel I can more con­fid­ently use ISO 6400 more on my cam­era now; tech­nic­ally it does go up to ISO 25,600 but I would have to try that out in Light­room before decid­ing whether it’s a real­istic option.

I went to Cam­bridge yes­ter­day, primar­ily to hand over my old 5D to its new owner, but also to take some pho­tos with the new Mark II while allow­ing my friend to try out his new toy at the same time. The vibrant col­ours of the mar­ket were a good source of pho­tos, but we were both rather dis­ap­poin­ted by the atti­tude of the uni­ver­sity staff. Whilst I was fram­ing a photo (hand-​​held, I should add) out­side Kings Col­lege Chapel, I was told we weren’t allowed to use tri­pods on the uni­ver­sity grounds. I poin­ted out I wasn’t using the tri­pod, but as it was stand­ing next to me, that coun­ted as ‘using’ it appar­ently. When I asked why not, all we got was ‘it’s the rules’.

Some­thing sim­ilar has happened to me before, next to the Lon­don Eye, where I con­cede that using a tri­pod could be con­strued as an obstruc­tion given how busy it is there, but as we were pretty much the only people out­side the chapel I can’t for the life of me under­stand why such a restric­tion would be in place. Of course we both left the grounds imme­di­ately, pon­der­ing the increas­ingly sus­pi­cious atti­tude of people towards pho­to­graph­ers in general.

Any­way if you want to see the pic­tures I did man­age to take, with or without a tri­pod, look no further.

I’m thor­oughly enjoy­ing get­ting to know the new cam­era, and in con­junc­tion with Sigma’s increas­ingly impress­ive 105mm EX-​​DG Macro I am get­ting some very pleas­ing res­ults. Here is a set of pic­tures taken at lunch time today at London’s fam­ous Bor­ough Mar­ket, a food mar­ket selling fresh, high-​​quality and expens­ive food. Every single pic­ture in this set was taken at ISO 3200, and the col­ours you see are just as the cam­era recor­ded them.

After return­ing from the shoot I had a mes­sage from Jac­obs that my new bat­tery grip had arrived. So, with today’s release of the Cam­era Raw update for OS X, I now have everything in place for a com­plete EOS 5D Mark II work­flow. All I need is to take some more pictures…