after doing these shots yesterday I have come to realise that I and possibly others have been possibly been approaching using long lenses with small apertures the wrong way . I have said from the start that these small sensor cameras with long lenses will suffer from noise and its a learning curve to beat it .
I have always approached the problem from the viewpoint of a ex dslr user and upped the shutter speed for action while curing noise from high iso in PP , yesterday with the spoonbills I had lots of time spare to play around with in camera settings , and obviously a low iso has helped as shown above .
today my mind has been mulling over the optimum setting so today I have been having a play using my 1-mkii and PL100-400 wide open its thrown up a few surprises to say the least i.e at 200iso the photos were showing colour fringing towards the yellow end and a slight blurriness , the optimum iso value in fact turned out to be 400iso giving the sharpest clearest shots with the best colour renditions to ..
obviously this is not a be-all-end all test but its a pointer in the right direction and has surprised me to say the least ,will put my findings into more field tests when next out but with winter approaching its going to help
200iso
2001so by
jeff and jan cohen, on Flickr
400 iso
400iso by
jeff and jan cohen, on Flickr
640 iso
6401so by
jeff and jan cohen, on Flickr
all taken one after the other ,all hand held only thing thats changed is the iso values .. all wide open f6.3 .. all P.P done exactly the same