 good morning i'm actually on my way out to the woods and driving past this lake i couldn't resist taking a few photos to go with today's video this is why i like autumn it has nothing to do with the color it's the weather and i'm always a sucker for clouds drifting over the forest all right enough of this let's uh let's head out into the forest today's about high iso like 3200 in digital how close is that digital noise resemble film grain that's something i've been very curious about and as you may know when i'm curious about something i gotta take you along for the video this is something that i don't know why it's taken me this long to even study or test or or look at woe there video david to be clear you're not saying you've never shot high iso before you were a journalist for god's sakes you just never used this camera for that kind of work and you thought that high iso wasn't a good option for your nature and landscape photography thought it was something to be avoided you've never considered shooting that way on purpose or as a usable option for landscape work okay now they've got that clear to back to video david i rarely shoot above iso 400 or or or even above base iso i'm always with the tripod when i'm shooting film i'm shooting the slowest film i haven't really looked at what's acceptable for grain or what's acceptable noise levels for me so that's what we're out here to do today 3200 weird does it look like film grain we'll see i don't have a tripod with me i mean there's not much reason for it because there are times when i'd i'd like to be out with a lighter gear or i just don't want to carry a tripod around i'm not anti tripod anybody that watches this channel knows i'm pretty much glued to a tripod all the time i learn photography way back in the film days way back and back then grain was considered image quality bust you know grain got into your image that wasn't the good thing we considered that degrading the image and so we would do everything we could to get finer grain or not blow up our images so big we'd go to medium format large format and often it was to mitigate grain we didn't want to see it in the past i've said i'm not a big fan of green but something's happened over the last year or two and uh it's not that it used to be i tolerated it but now i'm almost wanting it in some of my images or at least a little bit even fine grain film that i use it still has a texture it still has enough grain in it to to know that it's there then digital came along and that made it easier to not have the grain then we had noise and we were still shooting at base iso and then the cameras got better and better but still i was judging the quality based on the amount of noise and grain in an image but there's been a real shift in my taste over the last couple years it's been gradual and i went from i went from medium format film to large format film thinking i wanted more resolution less grain and what i noticed was is i kept going up it kind of looked like digital to me it started looking too clean and it was silly to to shoot a big negative for me and not and try to get grain out of it i just felt like that was it's kind of weird and i ended up back at 35 millimeter because it didn't look like digital to me or at least i didn't think it did i bet you never get tired of seeing me climb over logs this old man his old bones just just don't do it like i used to way out here i stopped and made a few uh weather shots across the lake with the clouds in the hills and that should simulate a grainy sky for me i was actually quite fortunate to come across that because i thought i was just going to be in the forest where the grain might uh or the noise might blend in better so we're going to get a good test of it today now i just need to find a few images to uh to make i'll probably revisit a couple places i've already shot because i already know there's going to be something i can use to compare it and i've shot these places in film and digital before but not at high isos it's a little overgrown it's last time i was out here oh i'm sure you see my channel you might recognize these boulders i just love how they're kind of right out here in the middle of the woods i've got my camera set up to show monochrome jpegs and i have the yellow filter on it adds a little more contrast gives me a realistic idea what i'm getting here this is pretty uh liberating i have to say like i said i'm not anti tripod tripod is very valuable to me but to be able to kind of just move through the scene and and make photos as i go is that's pretty cool today's a good example it's it's really dark in here and even 32 hunters may not be fast enough to get enough depth to field luckily i'm i'm using a 20 millimeter so depth feels a little easier to get and i could i could even hold handholding and i could probably focus stack but i don't really want to do that today i don't want to mess with it but we are starting at 3200 f8 f11 in there that some poster gives me more light this is a quite a neat spot and i have some good images here so if i don't if these don't turn out i'm not that worried about it because i photographed this a number of times that we've got some images made with my old nikon d810 digital camera let's do a little pixel peeping woohoo to be honest i didn't expect to see a whole lot here that would make me question why i'm even shooting black and white film i just wanted to make sure i wasn't missing opportunities when i wanted to go light when i first opened up the raw files shot at 3200 i was well underwhelmed this old camera just doesn't blow me away at high isos but i didn't expect it to i would just sing a lot of color noise and unpleasant color shift in many of the files i had pretty much all but written off the idea that i would get film like results from these files but i pushed on and started the conversion process anyway using affinity photo and silver effects too on this first photo with a bunch of sky when you punch in and remove the color noise it takes on a much nicer texture even at 3200 i have to magnify the shot quite a bit to really see the effects in the future i may need to push the iso even more just to see how that changes the aesthetics of the image but i do find that the texture in the sky does have a film like feel to it when we get to the four shots what i'm seeing has kind of shook my world it's kind of challenged the preconceived ideas i had on what i'd see in this test not only do the images have a film like structure or texture to my eye the tonality looks remarkably like the film shots i get i'm seeing what almost looks like a glow in the lighter background areas and that may have to do with the depth of field dropping off combining with the noise structure but for whatever reason it really has that kind of film look to me the images are plenty sharp for my uses this really could be a good example of why you don't always need maximum depth of field to have a pleasing photograph when doing this test i did one shot at iso 5000 in the hindsight i wish i had a push that iso even higher because what i'm seeing is the 5000 doesn't look a whole lot different than the third 200 i was sure that third 200 would be beyond what i would consider usable when we get to the detail shots and we punch into the background the out of focus areas the grain or the noise does look more apparent but you've got to really magnify it quite a bit to to really see it it's a lot more apparent than the in focus areas in the lighter areas doing handheld shots of details really seem to be a real strong possibility i have to admit i'm a little surprised by what i was seeing in these images i'm reluctant to make any final conclusions to what i've been seeing this is something i'm going to have to live with for a while and kind of study these files i've said in the past that i like the look of my black and white film images better than my digital black and white i've also said it could very well be that i just don't know how to edit my digital black and white files to get the tones i'm looking for and after inspecting these photos i'm starting to think maybe the problem wasn't how i was editing the photos but how i was shooting the images in the first place who would have thought that using my digital camera with settings that should give me less image quality has given me the quality i'm looking for so does iso 3200 look like film grain well i think it looks more like film grain than i expected it to i think this little test has created more questions than answers for me but it has shown me that i shouldn't write off my digital camera for doing black and white photography that there might be a time where grabbing my d810 makes more sense than grabbing my film camera and thanks for coming along on this little trip of discovery hopefully i've shown you something that you didn't notice before or something that has triggered some ideas that you might want to try so until next time thanks for coming along for the ride