I failed to photograph the only slogan I saw at Pride that made me laugh or at least smile; one of those times when you see something and for some reason don’t photograph it, intending to do so later. But later seldom happens.
So I didn’t get a picture. But it doesn’t really need a picture – and probably why I didn’t photograph it was that it didn’t make a good picture. “ASEXUALS don’t give a F**K” amused me, but not visually.
HM Prison Service: “Banged to Rights”
Fortunately quite a lot did visually appeal, and I took rather a lot of pictures, and despite a few technical problems quite a lot of them came out. Enough certainly to make editing a real pain.
It had been a good night on Friday, and I probably still wasn’t fit to drive a camera – fortunately they can’t breathalyse you for it. For some reason I left the D300 on a high ISO setting for an hour or so while taking pictures, though fortunately I managed to set the D700 to something sensible. Working with two bodies, I had a Sigma 12-24 (equiv 18-36mm) – just back from repair – on the D300 and another Sigma, the 24-70 HSM on the D700. So for that time the wide-angle shots were taken at silly settings like ISO 3200.
For mysterious reasons this was taken at ISO 2500
The results were noticeably more noisy than I’d like. With the D300, I’m fairly happy working at ISO 1600 if I have to, but try to avoid anything faster. For the first time in a year or so I found the noise reduction built into Lightroom wasn’t enough and had to turn to specialist noise reduction software.
There are I think several programs worth considering to reduce noise, and when I used to seriously review software I was given free licences for all of them. But two years ago I moved to a new PC, and could no longer get them to work. Fortunately that old PC still works, and I switched it on for the first time this year to process these images.
The 3 programs that I recommended after my tests – and still recommend – are Imagenomic Noiseware Pro, Neat Image Pro and Noise Ninja, all capable of excellent results. For these pictures I actually used Noiseware, but either of the others would have given similar results. You can actually download a free ‘Noiseware Community Edition’ for non-commercial use, which gives similar results although a few options are disabled. Its main limitation – at least if you only want to work with jpegs – seems to be that it is a standalone programme rather than a Photoshop plugin.
I sent a disk of mixed files taken at normal and high ISO to a library the day after Pride (I’d already e-mailed a few) and viewing them on my 21″ screen at 15″ wide the difference in quality is only noticeable on close inspection. At 1:1 it’s a little more obvious, but not greatly so. There is just a slight difference in colour quality that I think you can see even in the web files – more pictures on My London Diary – but frankly it’s still so much better than we would have thought possible just a few years ago.
Last year I wrote very little about Pride, but of course did take pictures I did give some links to some work from earlier years.
