ISO 10,000 with the Fujifilm XH2S
When I was down in Cornwall recently with my family, we were at the beach one evening when a lovely sunset started to develop.
Fortunately I had taken my camera with me that evening, so I attempted to capture the sunset as it progressed. I’ve never really spent the time to analyse what happens to the sky at certain parts of a sunset, and because of that I’ve probably missed a decent amount of photos due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On this occasion, I had my camera and was in as good a place as any and was in no rush to be anywhere else. So we all stayed and watch what developed. The sun was lovely and bright when it was nearly set, and as it disappeared behind the horizon, the sky started to turn pink, and then orange, and then red. It seemed like the longer we watched, the more intense the sky got.
I felt so lucky. When the sky does this, you have to just point your camera at a composition and make sure your settings are ok, and I was convinced I had an ok composition although the star of the show was the sky. After the show ended and we went back to our accommodation, I backed up the images and left them to edit at some point in the future.
The other day, I started to look at these photos, safe in the knowledge that I’d have a few amazing images. However, I noticed something as I started flicking through the images. The image metadata was showing the ISO as 10,000 for the last half of the photos I took that evening, and this included all the photos I took as the sunset reached it’s crescendo.
I was furious. I had obviously knocked the ISO dial the wrong way and it had changed the ISO to a setting that I would never normally use. I thought I was taking these photos at ISO 160, to get the best quality and cleanest images, and instead I was getting very noisy images.
The Image
So how much of a problem is this? The camera offers that high an ISO so there must be some use for it surely? And a bit of noise in an image isn’t terrible, is it?
I took the photo on a Fujifilm XH2S which is one of the Fujifilm cameras that has good ISO performance. But even so, ISO 10,000 is a lot.
Well, this is what the photo looked like. I’d rather have a cleaner image to be honest.
The Fix
I decided that one way to try and repair some of the image quality was to use Lightroom’s Noise Reduction feature. I have used this before on selected photos with mixed results. The success depends on the subject and conditions of the individual photo, but I thought that this photo might be a contender because I didn’t need exceptional sharpness. Once I had run the noise reduction process, this is the end result.
Conclusion
My photography journey is littered with times when things went wrong that I either knew about or was unaware of. You have to roll with it a bit. I’d rather have a noisy image than no image at all, and the technology these days give you some options to attempt a repair. I like the result, and as soon as the noise reduction finished I said to myself ‘that’s good enough’. Most of the time ‘good enough’ is a result I’m very happy with.
