grainy photos

[MckenzieMontague]

I was out takeing pictures of a friends little girl the other day and it was around 7pm. We photographed some of the pictures under a few trees where there wasn't very much light. After I downloaded some of the pictures, I noticed that the photos tended to look very grainy and noisy.

I use a Nikon D200 with Iso at 160, Whitbalance on Auto and and Exposer- 1/160 f/4.5. Can anyone tell my why the pictures turned out to be so grainy and noisy? Should I change my whitebalance and Iso settings? Thank you for your help.

 

[thebeginning]

did you mean ISO 1600, perhaps? at iso 160 you shouldn't get much noise, unless you seriously underexposed the photos then brought the levels back up...

 

[ksmattfish]

Sounds like underexposure to me. Possibly your camera was fooled by brighter light in the background.

 

[Reverend]

If you underexposed, then try to brighten it up post-processing (RAW or JPEG, doesn't matter), anything more than 1 stop underexposure is going to bring out the nastiness in the dark areas of the photo.