I took this picture with my Canon Rebel T6 using my 75-300mm F/4.0 Lense. I used shutter 1/4000, aperture f/5.6, and ISO 800. The picture seems very noisy to me, most of my photos come out this way. My question is it limitations of my equipment or something I'm doing wrong?
Not particularly noisy no. Is this at 100% and cropped in quite heavy? Images are not really meant to be printed or viewed at 100% unless you are trying to pixel peep, as you can see the bird is not as sharp as you would expect if the image was not cropped and he filled that much of the frame. (Alternatively I suppose you could be shooting at a resolution that is not full res.)
To illustrate my point cropping an image down 75-80% will give you a 2 megapixel versus the full res 18 megapixel image. But yes viewing the image at 100% will show some pixel detail. I would look at the image at 30% or full screen.
Here is the image without cropping. It still looks a little noisy to me, I am also at 18 mega pixels which is as high as I can go.
I don't actually think that the image is that noisy. I have read that Canon's 18 mp is not the best that they ever produced, but I can't back that one up as I have not used enough asp-c Canon cameras with different sensors to compare them to each other. I do think that this image is soft and maybe a little missed focused or a little blurred due to not tracking the bird. You said that all of your images are like this. Any chance of posting a few other images that are not birds in flight? Gary
Thanks for posting these images. Is this the lens that you are using by any chance? Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III USM Lens Review (the-digital-picture.com) I am going to take a guess and say that you are shooting at 300mm with this lens? I still don't think that these images are noisy. A little soft, yes. The last one is missed focused. But maybe if you change your ISO from 800 to 400 you may see some improvement. How are your images when you use the 18-55mm? Gary
Thanks for posting these images. Again, I don't think that they are noisy. I white car image is incorrectly exposed, which doesn't help. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are trying to explain. Could you use words other than noisy to explain what you think is wrong with your images? So could you please explain what you think is wrong with the very first image that you posted. Also, any chance of answering the question that I asked you in my previous post. It does help when more information is provided. Gary
i'm with Gary on this one too, the only one that seems noisy is the squirrel one and thats if i zoom right in on the image and its probably low res anyway the bird in the water plants is a case of missed focus and the car is probably the most concerning, not the fact its over exposed but the tire and front headlamp seem to be where the focal plane is at and its a fair bit soft i'm looking at it as a small file my side so there might be a fair bit of image loss but with the others cropping or long distance could be a contributor, the car image should be the one which would rule that out what i like to do with my lenses when i get them is to do a critical focus test on them on a serial box with fine text to see what they are like at their sharpest, also i do a quick de-centering test if they look a bit iffy dso far i've only had to send one lens back due to it being softer than i was expecting, i felt a bit guilty as i was comparing at the time to a stupidly sharp lens but several months later when i saw a cheaper copy of the lens i went for it knowing i could resell it for the same money and thankfully it was as sharp as i originally thought it should be the image below is a de-centering test, focus the lens on the image then manually defocus the lens, the dot in the middle should stay centered as you defocus, if it pulls to one side as you defocus one of the lens elements is not centered for a critical focus test put the lens on a tripod and take images of small text or fine pattern, if your camera has it use a timer to eliminate camera shake etc, do it for different distances and ƒstops, you should set your camera to the lowest iso as that is the cleanest and see what the results are, some lenses like a bit of stopping down for best sharpness where some lenses can be very sharp wide open as for a noise test, leave the lens end cap on, set everyting manually then start at iso 100 and take an image only stepping up the iso for each one, you will seeming have a series of blank images but when you review them on the computer write down each file size for each iso and also bring the exposure up in photoshop or what ever you use so you can see the noise in the image, do the same value for each one what you should notice is where the images do get more and more noise they don't do so in a step by step way, but some iso valuse can be cleaner than one or two before it, on mine iso 320 is particularly more free of noise that 125 or 250 this is more a camera / semsor test than anything to do with the lens but its something worth knowing when you in the field shooting and you just turn the iso one way or the other as you know which is slightly cleaner, makes a bit of a difference if you know you going to crop in in post rule of thumb for me is to shoot as low an iso as possible and know my cropping in limit so if i have to shoot higher iso i make sure i frame up so i don't have to crop in do you have any other lenses to compare the results with? it can be hard to judge a lenses sharpness if you only have one as a reference
The problem with these images is they are not nearly as sharp as I want and I am losing a lot of detail, like this image you have all the detail of the alligator. Is there any way to make all my images like this?
There are a few things here. Take the squirrel, his tail is blurry so I am guessing you had a slower shutter, if you want to freeze action you need to shoot fast enough for the action to freeze, also you need to shoot faster than the lens length or you can also introduce softness through hand holding blur. If you have a 75-300 a rule of thumb would be to shoot 1/300th or faster (its called the reciprocal rule 1/lenslength) I would say for a moving bird or squirrel probably closer to 1/1000 would be yielding frozen motion, but others here shoot more of the animal stuff than I. There are also tricks like setting a freeze trap or panning with the subject to help situation like that. Take the bird on the lilly pads, the pads in front picked up the focus not the bird, some of your shots seem like focus was missed for one reason or another, you can look at what your doing to focus and maybe tweak it a bit. Then for instance there is the car and that is an example where i think focus was looking at the grill and tire and tried to average out a good focus point, but the image is shot wide open I am guessing at f4 so not even the whole front end is sharp due to dof drop off. Depending on what you were going for you probably would have been much happier at f11 or the likes. The T6 is not going to have the fanciest auto focus so it will take practice to understand how your camera is acting, are you you using a auto eval by the camera of all points, or do you select the focus point you want in each image?
how did you get on with the critical focus testing, is the lens capable of very sharp / sharp enough for you under test conditions? also (to johnsey and others) is this the 75-300mm lens thats always being reported as soft at 300mm, i was thrown by the ƒ4 in the original post thinking it was a constant apperture, if its the one i think the lens itself is one of canons poorer optically, some people do love it so copy variation could be at play there
Any chance of taking a picture of this lens and posting it so we can see what you are using to shoot with? Gary
