Photography News | Issue 33 | absolutephoto.com
Camera test 35
IN ASSOCIATIONWITH
The D500’s ISO ranges from 100-51,200 with an expanded capability of 50-1,640,000 – this is one stop less than the D5’s H5.0 which gives 3,276,800. While I can’t imagine ever using an ISO so high it was, of course, worth seeing what the noise was like. To test out the ISO I took some shots of the interior of Peterborough Cathedral, and shot in aperture-priority A-E mode with an aperture of f/8. Starting with ISO 1,640,000 the results as you can see show an extremely noisy image, one that we wouldn’t even attempt to import and apply any noise reduction to. Working our way down the ISO range the noise seemed to dramatically decrease at ISO 512,000, with a fairly usable image at about 16,000. Moving further down to about 6400 was where the decrease in noise showed a lot more, andwhile retaining a lot of the detail, a fair bit of noise reduction would still need to be done in post-processing to recover this particular image. In my opinion ISO 3200 is where I’d be happy to shoot at, knowing that I could reduce the noise in post-processing without losing too much detail. Further down the line shooting with an ISO of between 100-800 is very clear with little noise as you would expect. Performance: ISO
Full-frame image
Being a keen live music photographer means I often shoot in low-light conditions and have to ramp up my ISO, especially if there’s tricky lighting. When shooting on my D7000 I tend to stick to ISOs of between 800- 1600, depending on the lighting at the venue I am shooting at. I dislike having to apply a large amount of noise reduction in post-processing, and even then sometimes at 1600 I have to apply more than I’d like to. I took the D500 along to a couple of gigs at different venues and pushed the ISO further than I usually do to see how it performed. For some gigs the stage lighting was very minimal, I always choose the widest aperture available when shooting. Normally I shoot with a 50mm f/1.8, but I decided to give the kit lens a test in this situation so kept at the wider focal lengths to keep the aperture wide. Inmost cases the lightingwasn’t particularly great so I started off at ISO 1600, what I normally shoot with, and then pushed it to 2000 to 3200. I’m quite conscious about noise so decided not to push it any further. That’s not to say shooting at a higher ISO would have been an issue, but a lot more noise reduction would have been required and this can often make images look too soft.
ISO 1600
ISO 2000
ISO 3200
ISO 6400
ISO 12,800
ISO 16,000
ISO 25,600
ISO 51,200
ISO 204,800
ISO 409,600
ISO 1,638,400
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