This post is not necessarily the kind of post that just shows the cute little ducks in their environment, but I’ve been trying to master a process to shoot in shitty light. As a wildlife photographer, my golden hours are early, early morning and later in the evening. That is when the birds are usually most active and your chances of getting a shot are better. But if that shot is so noisy, grainy and blurry it doesn’t really do you much good, does it?
I’ve been working with a concept, or process, called ETTR. Expose To The Right. It’s a fairly simple idea predicated on the belief that most of the noise in an image is contained in the 3 left quadrants of the histogram. Your histogram, (yes, all images have a histogram) is divided into quadrants with the darkest pixels of your image on the left and the brightest pixels on your right. The idea is that if you expose to the brightest side of the histogram (the right side), you can avoid the left side of the histogram where a large portion of the noise is contained. So basically you are overexposing your image which pushes your histogram to the right. If you look at your image, you will notice that the brighter the image, the farther to the right your histogram will lean. As long as you do not physically blow out the pixels, even if they look overexposed, you can reduce the overexposure in post processing without having to deal with nearly as much noise and grain in your images.
Some photogs swear by this concept, and some swear at this concept! But I’ll be working with it over the summer to see if it helps with my early morning photos.

I have a few examples below for you to look at so you can judge for yourself if it improves the images. And to me, if you are going to shoot at high ISOs, you will need some help from a noise reduction system of some kind. I use Adobe Lightroom and Topaz products, but there are several on the market You will have to try them out on your images to see if they will work for you. Zoom in on the images to see the difference.

1/800 at f7.1, ISO 16000 before post-processing

1/800 at f7.1, ISO 16000 after post-processing

As you can see, the image cleaned up fairly nicely because I overexposed (ETTR) and there were far fewer areas of darkness in the image. Click to enlarge.

When you first look at your images when using ETTR, they will without a doubt look overexposed. And they are. But you can also see that it’s not hard to adjust the exposure so you get a more pleasing image without excessive noise.

As you can see, even the ISO 25600 images aren’t terrible. And I had to massage the pics as far as white balance, background brightness, etc. But that’s what you have to deal with at high ISO. And my backgrounds left a lot to be desired also! And because these birds were so close to me, the depth of field is razor thin. The head and eyes are sharp, but the body blurs out pretty quickly. I had an 800mm lens on at the time, so the actual depth of field was probably no more than an inch!
I will hopefully refine the technique as I go, and the images will get better and better.
Give high ISO shooting a try. You really have nothing to lose!