Dave Stevenson
The top-end Nikon D3s’s maximum sensitivity means it’s hugely flexible – it can even shoot in the dark – and things are only going to get better…
Quick, who wants to play a trivia game? Name, with a good reason, the single biggest advantage that digital photography has over film. There are plenty of candidates, of course. Perhaps the ability to review your shots instantly, without resorting to a darkroom full of lethal chemicals and a nearly limitless number of ways to ruin your pictures.
That’s a decent first guess. What else? Quicker, easier ways of retouching your pictures would be another good one, but tools like Photoshop aren’t exactly new. In the small town where I grew up, we didn’t have ordinary teenager things like full-strength cider and knife crime to keep us amused, so I clearly remember using Photoshop to edit my pictures via Truprint’s film-to-CD service.
Perhaps the happiest outcome of digital photography’s triumph is the death of film itself. Stop feeling nostalgic for a minute and think about it: film is expensive to buy and process, and it’s ludicrously fragile. It’s sensitive to light, dust and temperatures at either end of the thermometer. And you can’t take a roll of ISO800 film within a thousand miles of an X-ray machine without it clouding over, so flying becomes even harder. As for the die-hards who say that images produced by film have a certain ‘feel’ to them, I’d point out that anything you can achieve on film can be done in seconds in Lightroom or Aperture, and with much more flexibility as well.
But for me, the biggest advantage to digital photography is a flexible ISO. For the uninitiated, ISO is a measure of sensitivity left over from the film days. The higher the number, the more sensitive your film is to light. So you might use film with an ISO rating of ISO200 during a sunny day, but have to use ISO800 film at night, as the more sensitive film allows you to use faster shutter speeds to get a good exposure.
You see what’s already happened, though. I was at the beach the other day. The sun was shining and it was a perfect day for photography. I took half-a-dozen shots at ISO200, then popped my camera back into my bag until the evening, when I used it again, indoors, at ISO1600. If I was shooting film, I’d either have needed to ditch half a roll of film to change the ISO, carried another camera body with a different-rated film, or simply not taken any pictures for half the day. With a digital camera – even cheap compacts – you can simply dial in another stop of ISO and halve your shutter speed.
I bring all this up because I’ve been thinking about ISO quite a lot recently. I’ve just returned to Nikon its amazing top-end DSLR, the D3s (see MacUser, 26 February, p27), which has a brain-melting maximum sensitivity ‘equivalent’ to ISO102,400. Nikon can’t even call it ISO102,400 because in the 190-year history of chemical photography, film never reached that level.
The D3s is useless at ISO102,400, of course. Its images have very little colour and no subtlety at all when it comes to gradients. Noise is random and pronounced, and there are nasty red heat spots all over the place. Still, it’s the first camera I’ve ever used that can shoot in the dark – Nikon claimed as much when it launched the camera, and I was among the journalists rudely sniggering at such a weird-sounding claim.
But it can. Look at the shot of Tower Bridge (below left). It’s not an amazing picture, but that’s because I couldn’t see enough through the D3s’s viewfinder to frame the shot and make sure it was focused. From a virtually pitch-black scene, the Nikon has dragged out enough detail to make an intelligible picture. Barring all but the most overcast, moonless nights, it was hard to find a situation that was too dark to shoot handheld. The next generation of professional cameras will mean you no longer need to worry about the quantity of light, but its quality. This is amazingly liberating.
Things are only going to get better. In the same way the original Canon 5D proved ISO3200 was usable, so the D3s proves you can build a camera that produces printable shots all the way up to 12,800. I haven’t seen Canon’s top-end 1D MK IV yet, but reports suggest it’s usable up to ISO6400 and that isn’t even a full-frame body. Consumers aren’t being left out, either: the Canon 550D will arrive soon, with its maximum ISO of 12,800. And while I expect images taken at its maximum setting will be pretty poor, perhaps it will be the first sub-£1000 DSLR that can shoot reliably at ISO3200.
This isn’t just theoretical navel-gazing or nerdy number fetishising. Better image quality at higher ISOs not only changes how you approach light, but significantly extends how much time you have available to you to shoot during the day. It reduces your reliance on a tripod, as you can handhold longer focal lengths at faster exposures. This is useful for anyone who uses a focal length multiplier that reduces the maximum aperture of a lens. It will also make long-lens photography more accessible to those without the means to spend four figures on a fast telephoto lens.
There are going to be plenty of DSLRs with handy bells and whistles this year. HD video is going to become more widespread – Nikon, Canon and Pentax already make DSLRs with movie modes and it’s safe to presume Sony’s not far behind. We’ll probably see movie improvements as well, such as phase-detection focusing while recording – something Sony already offers in live view mode on its still cameras. Give me the choice of a decent HD mode or noise-free ISO performance at five-figure settings, though, and I’ll take the ability to shoot in all light at fast shutter speed any day. Now, who wants to go back to film?
