Low Light Photography

Today's DSLR's have some serious technology built into them and their performance is amazing. One of the big improvements I see is in high ISO performance. This gives the photographer the ability to shoot in low light conditions with out the need of a flash. I took this as an opportunity to experiment with my camera and push it to the limits. In my opinion, it is very important to know and understand your equipment and its capabilities because you never know where your next shoot is going to be. You have to be able to get that oh so important shot when it counts and the sun is going down. You have to quickly adjust your settings in order to properly expose your subject and cranking up that ISO is just one way to do it. You don't want to tell your client that you couldn't get the shot that they were looking for or that it didn't come out right because you lost some much needed light. Sure, most can be fixed with a little PP but personally, I like to get the shot I want in-camera. I want to do as little post processing as possible as it can be very time consuming and lets face it, time is money. For this shot, I was waiting for the subway train to come and decided to take the shot with out the use of flash. Now, anybody that has been in the subway knows that the light isn't the greatest down there. I cranked the ISO to 800 (I normally don't like going past 200 if I can help it but felt the need to push the camera) opened the aperture all the way (f/2.8 on Canon's 24-70L lens) and pulled the trigger while the train was slowing down. As you can see, the noise performance is great and honestly I could've cranked the ISO a lot more by looking at the results. I was able to set the shutter speed fast enough (1/160) to stop the train's movemet and get a decent exposure under these low light conditions which makes me love my camera even more. All in all, the moral of this story is to experiment with your equipment and learn to push it so it helps you get the shot that the other photographers missed.