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Wandering around Florence at night during Liz and my mini city break, I wasn't too hopeful of being able to take any meaningful photos with my little Nikon D3100, being limited to hand held exposures only.
However, more in hope than anticipation I wound the ISO up to an eye watering 3200 and took several photos of the famous Duomo as we strolled by.
Fortunately the Duomo was well lit and stood out in stark contrast against the black night sky and the less well lit city streets - quite dramatic.
On reviewing the RAW files once back home, I was pleasantly suprised at how good they were. Sure there was more noise than I would have got from a baseline ISO exposure, but nowhere near as much as I'm used to getting from my old Canon 5D at high ISOs.
I carried out a couple of noise reduction techniques on both the RAW and processed files, followed by a conversion to monochrome to get rid of the yellow colour cast from the streetlights and at the end I was really please with the final result.
This is great, as it gives me an option for night time city photography that doesn't involve setting up a huge tripod in the middle of a narrow and busy street.
Nice one!
Filename - florence duomo 04.jpg
Camera - Nikon D3100
Lens - 18-55mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/30sec @ f5.6, ISO3200
Location - Florence, Italy
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - High ISO used to incease shutter speed for hand held exposure.
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