I See, I See....I See Noise!!

This was suppose to be a post about my week with a rose; however, right in the middle of cropping and post processing my images from the past two nights, I saw something.  I thought that something was a little weird, but I just dismissed it.  Not sure why or what I chalked it up to be, but I just didn't spend too much time on it, other than wondering why the bokeh looked so weird.  Then I started taking notes for my post and looking through my image properties and there it was again....right in my face....that something....that something I had just ignored 15 minutes before....it was loud and it was very clear.....it was NOISE from a 3200 ISO setting....again and again and again!!! 

I truly wasn't in the mood to go back downstairs and shoot more rose photos, but I had clearly made a mistake and I had to see the difference for myself.  I had to re-take a few more shots and expose to you my lesson learned for the night.   Of course I could have just written about it...but what fun would that have been..remember...hands on adult learner here! 

Quick Tip:  The lower the ISO, the less noise.  Noise is color speckles in your photos where there should be none. Sometimes you have to raise the ISO in particular settings (indoors, evening, etc) to get the exposure you're looking for, especially if you are using a slower lense.  I typically try to always shoot at an ISO of 200 to avoid the noise in my photos. So, how did I ever get to 3200..blame the moon, Venus and Jupiter...yep, I was planet watching two nights ago and forget to change my camera settings back after changing lenses! 

So, let's take a look at what all this noise is about.  The first photo below was taken with an ISO of 3200. At an f-stop of f/3.2 and the correct exposure read 1/250 of a sec.  The second photo was taken at an ISO of 200.   At an f-stop of f/3.2 the correct exposure  read 1/30 of a sec.  Notice how much smoother the bokeh (blur) is in the second photo and how much cleaner the photo is. The second photo is actually more true to what the image looked like in my light box as well.  You can really see the speckle difference when you look at the top left corner (grey area) of each photo.  The second photo again is much cleaner. 

Obviously from these photos, you can see that my rose is slowly wilting. I'll post some of the other shots later this weekend in a drive by, but don't hold the noise against me..remember I'm a student driver! 

 And by the way..while the planet watching caused a bit of controversy in my brain, it created a few lasting memories for me and my son.

The Moon and Jupiter (Venus was hiding behind a house)

Unveiling and making lots of noise,
Dee