Up until recently I would never normally shoot shots of wildlife above ISO 400.  Preferring that ISO as a maximum that I would get away with.  On my 50D I would occasionally go to 640 at a push, but found them fairly noisy, so kept 400 as my normal max.  However with some recent posts on the forums and especially some on the Pixalo.com, I decided to try out higher ISO’s on some bird shots using my 650D, my latest digital camera.  Having been impressed with some 800 and 1600 ISO shots, today I went and shot even higher at ISO 3200 and the maximum on the camera ISO 12800.

The main advantage being that the shutter speed is raised when comparing with a lower ISO using the same aperture – especially useful on poorer light days – and for shooting smaller birds that are constantly on the move around feeders.

These shots were all taken using the Canon 650D with a Canon 1.4x MKIII Extender and Canon 300mm F4 IS Lens.

Whilst I’ve not tried printing them out, I have found them more than usable for my viewing and posting on web forums.  So I will more than likely use higher ISO in the future when needing to get a higher shutter speed, than a lower ISO will give you on a dull day.

The following shots show the image from the RAW file (just a minor levels & vibrance adjustment on the Nuthatch shots, and nothing on the chaffinch, on the before files.). I have followed these with a subsequently adjusted shot, using Topaz Denoise 5 (just picked the moderate.jpeg preset) and then an Photoshop CS6 unsharp mask.   I hope you agree even those these images have been uploaded after a save for web, that the ISO 3200 are more than useable for web purposes.  The 12800 being a slight step too noisy for my personal tastes.

First the ISO 3200 Shots

Chaffinch ISO3200 Original

Chaffinch ISO3200 Adjusted

ISO 3200 No Adjustment 100%

ISO-3200-Adjusted-100%

Nuthatch ISO3200

Nuthatch-adjusted3200

ISO 3200 No Adjustment 100%

ISO-3200-Adjusted-100%

And finally the ISO 12800 images.

Nuthatch ISO12800

Nuthatch-12800-Adjusted

ISO-12800-Unadjusted-100%

ISO-12800-Adjusted-100%