Night Owls

URBAN LANDSCAPE: This was shot across the street from the Salisburymural in Salisbury, North Carolina. Comments welcome. For moredetails, click "Details" beneath the photo.

 

--Lannie

These are wonderful for handheld.  Imagine what you could do with a tripod!

Hi Lannie,

  Wonderful night shot with great lighting & colors.  Great hand held image.  Take care, Patsy

Thanks to you both.  Yes, the lack of a tripod here forced me to turn up the ISO, and noise did thereby substantially interfere with resolution. 

 

This small section has been downsized somewhat (from a 100 percent crop) to make the noise a bit less obvious.

 

Of course, no one would say that the T2i is a good low noise camera.  It is not.  An f/2.8 lens would have helped somewhat, but not too much--it would have allowed me to drop the ISO to 800 and still get the same exposure.  Noise would have been a bit less with that one-stop difference.  Dropping to f/2.0 would have allowed me to reduce ISO another stop to 400, but a 200mm f/2.0 lens would be prohibitively expensive.  Even so, it is pretty obvious that the primary limitation of the T2i is the glass used.  The 1.6x crop sensor (with 18 megapixels) really is quite good with good glass--it is essentially the same sensor that comes with the Canon EOS 7D.

 

A tripod would also have reduced camera shake, of course.  This particular lens did not have IS, and the result of camera shake on resolution is obvious, apart from ISO and noise issues.

 

--Lannie

How much would it cost to have shot this at f/2.0 rather than f/4 on a 200mm lens?  Only six thousand dollars--but that lens would include IS, folks.

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/542292-REG/Canon_2297B002_Telephoto_EF_200mm_f_2L.html

 

The posted shot was made about 100 feet away from these diners, as best as I can tell from the Google map of Salisbury.   (I was standing just in front of the wall mural when I shot this.)  Had I been standing on the sidewalk immediately in front of this restaurant, I could have used a 50mm f/1.8 lens that would cost not too much over $100.  At that distance, I would not likely have gotten a candid photo. . . .  The EF 70-200mm f/4 with IS would have cost perhaps about $700 more than the lens that was used.  You get what you pay for, I guess. 

 

I should have brought my Nikon D3s with the 28-70mm f/2.8 zoom, but the whole point of going out was to find out what the T2i could do in low-light shooting.  I started on the plaza in Spencer, where I could see possible robbers coming in every direction, but I could not get the mounting plate to attach due to a badly threaded hole.  So, I came back to Salisbury to find a brighter subject--and that led me to the mural, which is well-lighted at night.  It was while shooting the mural up close that I noticed this potential shot.

 

--Lannie

Oops!  I forgot that I did not shoot this shot at the 200mm end of the zoom range.  I shot it at the 70mm end.  Perhaps an EF 85mm f/1.8 (which costs less than four hundred dollars) could have worked and gotten me more than a two-stop advantage over the f/4 that I shot this at.  So, I guess that I don't need the $6k lens after all. . . .  Professional event photographers might, though.

 

--Lannie