First time shooting foliage...C&C please!

feg94 · Sep 30, 2014

Yesterday I took my camera out to a state park and shot a few pictures of some leaves. I immediately noticed that they look grainy, so tips are greatly appreciated.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/pt4rY3]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/pbAqS3]

Foliage III by Capit0lism, on Flickr[/url][/url]

dannylightning · Sep 30, 2014

they are a bit grainy, not sure how your camera does at 1600 ISO, that could be why, the higher the ISO the more grain you get, some cameras do better at higher ISO than others. also in some lightning conditions a camera may do better with a higher ISO than it will do in another lightning condition.

or maybe you did allot of sharpening or image processing, that can add allot of extra gain depending on what you do to the photo, shooting RAW seems like it will let you do more sharpening and processing with less grain. I have been shooting in raw and than after i fix up the image in light room i export the image to JPEG

I think these are nice photos, I cant really say why they have grain but those would be my guessing.

BillM · Sep 30, 2014

That would be noise not grain, it is typically seen at higher ISO or when when under exposing. It will really come out if you bring up the exposure in post processing. Try overexposing just a touch and you should see a nice difference, maybe do a little reading on "exposing to the right".

But not to worry, with todays post processing a little noise is easy to fix. That is if you think it really needs fixing, these look fine to me.

But I am not an expert, there are plenty of those here and I am sure they will chime in.

It is a beautiful time of year to shoot here isn't it :icon_thumleft:

Ysarex · Oct 1, 2014

As Bill noted you're seeing noise in the photos. Your photo begins as an electrical signal from the sensor. With full exposure the sensor delivers it's strongest signal. As you decrease exposure to the sensor the signal weakens and it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the signal (your photo) from the inherent noise in the system. Raising the ISO on the camera is basically underexposing the sensor.

It's progressive. Raising the ISO from 200 to 400 is a small step and the increase in noise will be nearly imperceptible. Raise the ISO to 800 and you get a little more underexposure and a little more noise and so on. You raised the ISO to 1600. But then you went further (I looked at 3rd photo of poison ivy) and used the camera's exposure compensation function to decrease the exposure even more -- two stops. You set a -2 EC. That's equivalent to having set the camera ISO to 6400. If the base ISO of your camera is 100 then that's basically underexposing the sensor by 6 stops -- you're going to get some noise, but that doesn't mean you don't take the photo.

Question: Did you need to do that? The photo is taken at 1/400 sec. shutter speed. If you took the photo at 1/200 sec. you could recover one stop of that underexposure and have less noise. If you took the photo at 1/100 sec. you could recover two stops of that underexposure -- gotta hold the camera still at 1/100 sec but you could probably do it and have even less noise.

Nice photo of poison ivy; it could use some processing help in large part because of that -2 EC -- that was not a good move. Here's the photo with some corrections including some filtering to suppress the noise.

Joe

AlanKlein · Oct 1, 2014

Use a tripod.

AlanKlein · Oct 1, 2014

Tripods will allow critical focus. Your shots show movement. Also, because you're on a tripod, you can slow down the shutter speed and make the aperture correspondingly smaller. This will increase the depth of focus (DOF). More can be in focus from front to rear if that's what you want. Slower shutter speeds mean you can reduce the ISO which reduces the graininess. Tripods allow you to compose the picture better so you can examine the shot before snapping and avoid cutting off leaves like the one on the right in shot #3. Good start and keep shooting. You'll do great.