One of the negatives about a crop-sensor camera like my Canon R7 is that the images it produces tend to have more noise than images produced by a full-frame camera. As you might recall noise is seen in an image as graininess – little dots throughout the picture. I used to set my shutter speed as low as possible to reduce the ISO (which is an indicator of how much noise the image will contain). On sunny days I would set my shutter speed to 1/800th of a second. On an overcast day I would set my shutter speed to 1/320th to 1/180th of a second. This reduced the noise but I lost images because the shutter speed was so slow it didn’t stop even slow actions like the legs of a bird as it walked. Then I saw the Puffin picture.
You remember the one from the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards. The Puffin was perched on a jet-black rock formation with some flowers nearby. It was dark outside with some rain coming down. Photographer Shane Kalyn set up his camera at 1/6400th of a second! I would probably have set mine two-hundred times slower in an attempt to get a reasonable ISO/noise level but Shane’s image had an ISO of 2000! Any images of mine at 2000 would have been very noisy so I have to assume he used a denoise program to reduce the graininess. The picture turned out is beautifully.
My takeaway? Don’t worry about the noise. I now set my shutter speed to 1/2000th of a second and so far I’ve been happy with the results. Far fewer shots have been lost due to movement blur and if a picture has too much noise I get rid of it.
What do you set your shutter to for most shots? I’d be curious to know.
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