Just another grotty high ISO night pic

About to run out of these high ISO test pics, but this one caught my eye as there’s (not counting the lack of detail) not much wrong with it, ignoring the burnt out white highlights of the downlighters on the house.

It’s better than I thought, but did need to have noise removed from the dark areas, and a touch of contrast enhancement and sharpening, just to add some edges.

The light has been reasonably rendered with a cold white on the house, something warmer for the LED streetlights, and some golden yellow for the HP sodium at the bottom of the hill.

The trees are reasonable, as it the road, and the completely unlit area with the trees on the left has come out as black. Even the bare branches on the tree in the middle can be seen against the sky.

One thing I haven’t mentioned in the test pics is the sky.

A few years ago this would have been yellow, from the nationwide LP sodium street lighting of the day. Alternatively, it may have suffered some weird colour shift (nobody ever told my why) and shown another colour, often gaining lots of blue, which could be a pig to correct/remove.

When I run out of these tests, I’ll have to try to find some way to improve the focus/sharpness.

I used to think it was either bad focussing on my part, or the camera, depending on conditions, but that seemed unlikely as various attempts to cure both didn’t make much difference.

I thought it was my habit of always shooting hand held, and related to the settings and higher ISO I tended to use (nowhere near as high is the recent test shots featured), but when I fired off a few low ISO setting using a tripod, I STILL couldn’t get sharp focus, and the results weren’t really all that different.

I must be doing something wrong, or missing something obvious. ☹

Something ALWAYS goes wrong – 2025 Fireworks NOPE

I’m sorry. Somehow this became a ramble.

Skip about halfway down to avoid most of it, and get to the pic waffling.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Glasgow City Council ended its Glasgow Green fireworks the year after I made my first visit back for years, and had by then managed to acquire a camera that did the show justice, when I had a look for alternatives this year, things just went downhill.

The only big alternative was Strathclyde Park, which I did get to last year, but couldn’t get very near, public transport options are limited, as in there’s only one bus. That said, for just viewing the show, there is a selection of nice high viewpoints, which almost work for pics too. The problem is really mine, have been spoiled by the great close view offered by the Glasgow Green show.

And the news told me – NO Strathclyde Park show this year, thanks to extensive works being carried out in the park, near the watersports area.

Well, that’s really my own fault, having barely made it to the park at all this year, and that wasn’t recent.

I tried

I was initially just going to forget it this year.

I’ve gone to a high road that overlooks the surrounding area, and the view is interesting, but everything is far away and small, so quickly gets boring.

Then I remembered I’d spied some high spots not far from home, and wondered if they might be better, not being so far away from the action.

The 10-minute walk revealed a reasonable viewpoint, although I had no idea what might be seen, and there did not seem to be anything listing any sort of local displays. As it was, it seems some wealthy people were burning their own money, with some sizeable shells being launched nearby.

While the view was reasonable, the same cannot be said of a few old trees (in other words, they were big), or a few streetlights, which unfortunately land both sodium and LED right in the view. While I found I could climb a little higher and almost get above them, I had to stand in some more recent trees, and their low branches got in the way, leaving only a few places where I could stand.

But, there was a REAL problem

I’ve mentioned this before, when just rambling about really low light night pics, when it gets too dark for the camera’s autofocus to operate.

By then, it’s too dark to see any detail in the viewfinder, and switching to manual focus doesn’t help – modern cameras don’t come with the eyeball focussing aids seen in the old days of film and NO autofocus.

Then, we had split prisms in the viewfinder – all you had to do was find a line somewhere, and adjust the focus until that line was not split by the prisms, and you were focussed. You didn’t actually have to be able to see anything. The other common one was an area of microprisms – once they disappeared and the area looked smooth, the lens was focussed on the subject under those microprisms.

In this case, all I could see in the distance were the dots of streetlights, and it was not possible to see when they were sharp.

Just to make things worse, a consumer level lens is really only made to work with autofocus, and/or bright scenes, so its manual focussing mechanism is far from brilliant. My lens seem to have terrible hysteresis in manual, meaning the focussing ring has to be moved a lot before it starts having a noticeable effect, then it just too coarse,

I didn’t really get anything worthwhile – although it did appear to be OK in the rear LCD. In reality, it wasn’t once inspected at full size.

But, at least now I know – all I need to do is find £3 k to £5 k to get close to shots I consider good.

A few from the night – but focus was largely a disaster.

I usually overcome this sort of thing by focussing on something at the same distance as the subject, but here, there was just nothing.

This was the first shot I took, wide to get an idea what it contained, and autofocussed because there was light from the streetlights.

Note how the old sodium light has thrown so much glare it’s impossible to see/recover anything near it, while the LED has completely controlled its light.

I haven’t caught such a wide area of sky in a shot like this for some time, and it’s abundantly clear that white LEDs have now displaced the once dominant yellow sodium light.

This was just the next one that came out with a semblance of focus.

Could it have been improved?

Probably, but time is still a factor.

This one did have a reason.

Unfortunately I don’t know it, but the illumination of the clouds from some ground source was strong at this time, although it did diminish later.

All I could work out was that it was south of the East Kilbride Expressway, on a line through Blantyre and Limekilnburn – but it’s hard to be exact in the dark.

This one caught my eye because of that rising column of smoke.

It was interesting because to the eye, it wasn’t nearly as noticeable as the view recorded in the pic.

Last of the remotely usable pics was another unexpected result.

Seen here, the exploding firework is almost all visible.

But, to the eye, the portion behind the tree was almost completely invisible.

When I first saw this, it looked almost as if the firework was in front of the trees, rather than behind, which it wasn’t

A little more info

This was a spontaneous outing, with no planning or real thought, just to see if ANYTHING could be captured.

As usual, all shots are hand held, demonstrating that the usual open shutter and tripod with a delayed or remote shutter firing is not the only way to take firework pics,

I see that the typical shutter speed was in the order of 1/20 sec – mix all the rest as you like.

Unlike last year, where I was obliged to use a tripod, I didn’t get any trails with wavy lines from vibration – my own fault for manually triggering the shutter while fireworks were exploding, but unavoidable as the distance meant I couldn’t hear the launch, and preempt their arrival.

How good (or bad) is the ‘old’ camera I used on the Forth and Clyde Canal outing?

It’s probably not fair to just show the ‘bad’ pics taken by the little old camera I took for a day out on the Forth and Clyde Canal, especially since they were shot under conditions this camera doesn’t really possess the image sensor to cop with, that period when the sun has set, and darkness is hurrying to end the day.

I’m really spoilt by being able to hand hold pics taken in that zone (using a dSLR), and even later if there’s a sniff of light to be found, reflected from clouds or, nowadays, from nearby white LED street lighting.

But that’s another subject, this is about how far today’s image sensors perform compared to yesterdays.

Less than ideal, this post contains the shots that just couldn’t quite make it, no matter how I tried, The best thing about them is that between my bracing the camera, and a fairly good image stabilising system, none of those pics show any evidence of camera shake, or movement during the longish exposures.

Apart from the camera mistakenly thinking proper focus had been achieved, and allowing the shutter to be released, the next most noticeable sign of age is the poor rendition of detail. This can be seen in shots where there are trees, as the leaves and branches just run together, in a sort of green mud, rather than showing any detail of individual leaves, or even branches. The same is true of any area that has low contrast, and everything just gets muddy, and runs together. This should not be confused with poor focus.

By way of comparison, I took a couple of example shots in the sunshine, seen below, and these show that even under good lighting, the old sensor is no match for today’s, and a look at the two pics should show that despite being reasonable pics, highlights in particular are quick to hit peak white, and lose detail. Reducing the exposure doesn’t really help, as that means shadow detail is lost.

Apart from reducing the size, the only thing I did to these examples was lift the shadows to show there was detail there, and reduce the highlights to calm down the brightest areas a little. Focus is ‘as shot’, with no enhancement. It’s slightly better than seen here, as I’ve found that reducing the size of the image also reduces the sharpness – an effect it took me some time to identify as the cause of my images being ‘softened’ when seen online.

Other than note that this camera does still work reasonably well on a good day, and shouldn’t really be taken out after sunset, I think comparing the pics seen in the two posts says more than I can.

Improvements aren’t just down to the sensor, as the camera also ‘silently’ processes the capture before delivering it, and both tames down areas of high brightness, and raises shadow detail before saving the result (unless you disable this, or are shooting RAW).

I have to confess seeing this has unfortunately set me off again, and lust after the last revision of my dSLR, as its low light ability has been boosted by four stops, something that would make my life easier as I chase down hand held shots in darkness.

It would be a luxury though, as I can take shots in near darkness already, with a little help from something to lean against.

No harm in watching for a suitable body to turn up though, the real problem only comes if one does!

Cone army on the march

Just a bit of fun, but it revealed an interesting effect.

Not sure what happened to this section of fencing. There had been a previous incident where a car flew off the road for no apparent reason nearby, and took out another couple of sections, but as noted, that was nearby, and unrelated. These cones arrived and offered their services to help prevent poor pedestrians from spontaneously falling off the footpath and onto the road. It’s probably not too obvious or clear given the angle of view in this pic, but the pavement is raised more than a foot above the road (in fact, the road was lowered, to level it, rather than the pavement being raised).

The army of cones

The intriguing thing about this pic was that I couldn’t apply any form of sharpening to it, and had to manipulate the contrast/gamma to raise the detail.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that although my originals are usually focused and sharp, when I knock the large original image down to a size suitable for placing online, all the edges go ‘soft’ and have to be revived by applying a dash of sharpening.

In this case, no matter what I did with this pic, the process caused highly objectionable interference fringes to appear in the section of vertical railings in the upper rear area.

It’s not an unusual effect, but this is the first time I’ve not been able to fiddle with the settings and reduce it to a level that’s not objectionable and distracting.

Now, that only leaves the question of why they didn’t tie that last cone in with the rest.

Maybe it’s in charge?

Why I hate being forced to use the compact

While I gain the advantage of being able to catch pics on days when I can’t carry a dSLR/zoom combo, I still can’t say I’m happy with having to use a small pocketable compact camera.

While the disadvantages remain outweighed by the fact of catching pics that would otherwise have been missed, it’s still not fun using a camera that takes time to switch on, has to grind the zoom lens out and in before becoming useable, takes ages to focus, and then to take the pic after the shutter button has been pressed. It’s so different from a dSLR, always on and ready to go with no fuss – it’s actually a better point-and-click camera than a… point-and-click camera. I won’t even dwell on the delivery of an image that can’t be cropped or zoomed (as it’s too fuzzy).

But the biggest pain is the lack of viewfinder, and having to hold the thing at arm’s length to use the screen on the back for composing and checking the shot – it’s so discreet and unnoticeable (NOT!).

Even a ‘large’ LCD doesn’t show enough detail to warn of failure of the autofocus, and it’s too late to redo the shot after you get home and see the full-size image.

The first pic was the one I wanted, just for the fun of the ‘First cat spotted outdoors for Spring 2017’, but useless autofocus.

The second pic is focussed, but useless, with the cat behind the fence, and not looking cute on the window ledge.

Cat Focus Fail