Originally posted by Weldon Berger Not that the picture is an artistic triumph, but how many cameras get you a serviceable result from a handheld shot taken at 1/15th at night at 68mm while leaning across the copilot toward the passenger window? And this is from somebody whose hands aren't exactly the steadiest. The lens is the 18-135mm WR at f/4.5, so not what one could call fast.
The RAW image was seriously underexposed because I had the iso set to a maximum of 1600. The second image is corrected for exposure only, could be made to look much better with some additional post. The black and white image is corrected for exposure, and I did a little noise reduction before converting it to black and white and bumping the contrast. I think I applied the lens correction in Camera Raw also. It could be made to look better too, with more than a cursory edit, but the main thing is the image came off the camera relatively crisp and with no blur other than from the pedestrians moving. No crop, just reduced so I could upload them. I've always shied away from shooting in these kinds of circumstances, but seeing the results here and in some other recent low-speed night shots has expanded my horizons. I really do love this camera.
That is a more than acceptable result. The ability to bring that much underexposure up to a nicely exposed "print" is a true marvel to someone who fought with Kodachrome 10 and 25 in the early 1960's. I took pix in a hockey rink in 1962 with Tri-X and pushed it to 3200 in the dark room. You could tell there were players on the ice, and the game was "probably" hockey, but that was about it.