Point and Shoot Photography

How far can you push your point and shoot photo cam in low light? I have been wondering about this for a while.

Anna Antonicheva and Vladimir Neporozhniy

Here are some surprising settings for a surprisingly good picture:

This picture was shot with a low end Leica point and shoot V-Lux 20. I have used the full optical Zoom range equivalent to 300 mm in 35 mm focal length.

Instead of shooting a 12 MB size picture as I usually would do, the size here is reduced to 3 MB.

Dimensions: 2048 x 1536 pixels
Resolution: 180 dpi
Bit depth: 24
F-stop: f/4.9
Exposure time: 1/50 sec (handheld)
ISO speed: 3200

You may download the original as it came from the camera, click HERE. Unfortunately the cam does not produce RAW format but the JPEG looks great anyway.

Digital cameras tend to reduce resolution as the ISO gets pushed up which gives an optically better result namely for as long as you don’t crop up the picture. This reduction of resolution is caused by the camera’s noise reduction system.

Here another example at ISO 4000 (the other settings as above)

 

Try to fire your cam at high ISO and may be you will get as surprising results as I did. And just think of it: by reducing the image size when publishing, noise will be heavily reduced anyway:-).