Question on Exposure

rhubarb

rhubarb

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Name
Giles
Edit My Images
Yes
I was out taking shots a little while ago with another photographer. Standing next to each other and taking the same subject at the same time we have vastly different results in terms of exposure. Comparing my unprocessed shot and their processed shot - there's looks bright, mines dull and noisy. Now I'm wondering if its just a case that I underexposed mine compared with there's or if they've done a lot of post processing on the image. So the question is given two different sets of settings is it possible to compare the two and see how different they are in terms of exposure.

My shot was 360 seconds, F14 and ISO250 (should have been 200 but missed the dial)
There shot was 511 seconds, F18 and ISO100

Is there away to sort of normalise these figures? For me I think they were 2 stops less than mine taking into account aperture and ISO, and there doesn't appear to be 2 stops more in their shutter speed

In terms of kit we used
My shot was with d300, 10-20mm at 14mm with ND110 and 0.9 Grad
There's was with a D3, 12-24mm at 16mm with an ND110 - no grads

I'm just trying to figure out why they're so different and if its just down to post processing skills.

Thanks
 
I take it you were shooting in fading light, your 0.9 Grad has made your exposure darker while the other tog has a longer exposure making it brighter without a Grad.
Sounds like you were using the Grad to hold back the sun, maybe it was lowered too far over the land ?
It shouldn't be noisy unless you've tried to recover it too much in processsing.
 
Hi there, thanks for all of the responses. It was changing light. the shot was of a white bridge crossing the sea at Zeeland in Holland. The ND0.9 was to over exposure the sea slightly to create the long exposure milky effect. I'd metered for the sky all in full manual mode.

But I hadn't thought about the RAW side of things what the EXIF shows could be +/- 2 stops by default.

I guess the reason really for the question I'm most worried about the noise I'm getting, at low ISO there shouldn't be any but its very noticeable even before I've processed the RAW, so just in LR jpeg preview. So could be down to full frame handling it better in marginal conditions

Anyway thanks for your replies
 
I think the major difference is that the D3's sensor is two and a half times bigger than the D300, and is much better at handling noise. It just has so many more photons to play with - more than twice as much of everything which impacts on every aspect of the image.

That's what you're paying for with full frame. Bigger is better, plus the D3 is known to be particularly good at this sort of stuff.

Did you really need such a long exposure? It's asking for long-exposure noise problems, and f/14 is going to be bad for diffraction. Something like 100secs at f/8 in round numbers would be much better from an image quality point of view, 50secs at f/5.6 even more so.

What was your histogram like? Any underexposure always makes noise much worse. Good post processing can also improve things a lot.
 
In terms of your exposure, the other guy is probably 1 stop under-exposed compared to you. The D3 is particuluarly good at handling noise, although both cameras offer 'long exposure noise reduction'; the D3 is just better at it. It's worth noting that ISO200 is optimum on the D300, though.

It's hard to say without seeing both images, but given that he is ~1 stop less exposed based on numbers, I'd echo that you were both metered on different parts of the scene. RAW gives you the freedom to either +/-2 stops expose the image, so you're also right in that he has perhaps rescued his shot in PP.
 
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