Every year Athens holds a bike race in the downtown area. Last year I covered it for the Red & Black (see here), but this year after I finished with Gymnastics I went over for some pleasure shooting.
I wanted to try some things with my camera that I hadn’t tried before so I thought about some research I had done earlier in the day about pixel density and low light shooting. The gist of it was, the Nikon D3 can achieve really high ISO’s without a ridiculous amount of noise because the full frame sensor only has to produce something like 12 megapixels (max ISO is 25,600). Comparatively, Canon’s full frame 1Ds is about 24 megapixels but can only achieve a maximum ISO of 3200.
Long story short, the bigger the pixels on the sensor, the better they are at handling low light. That in mind I amped my camera up to 6400 ISO and the image size down to 5.3 megapixels (more than enough for anything I’d be doing with these photos. So, how did my camera perform at high ISO and half its designed megapixels? Like a champ.
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| Cyclists during the Pro-Criterium at the 29th Annual Twilight Criterium round the Clayton and Baxter Street intersection in downtown Athens, Ga. |
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| This thing really kicked and it got some nice color to boot. |
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| This one is a little bit grainy, but you can’t win ‘em all. |
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| Sharp where it needs to be, good color recreation, whats not to love? |
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| This one is a tad yellow, but so was the overall lighting. |
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| I was illustrating the difference between a photo with the in-camera noise reduction and one without, ended up liking this photo. |
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| Fast sports at night with little light don’t really give you too much to work with, but I can thank Mark Johnson for drilling stop, pan and blur into my brain. |
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| My friends I met up with got hungry, their opportunity to eat was my opportunity to crank out another photo. |
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