I did today's photo for a challenge that I sometimes enter. http://form.pbase.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=47743) The idea was to have a look at noise with high ISO settings. Well, let me tell you that you have to go to extremely high ISO settings with the 5D Mk3 to get any noise at all. I figured that wouldn't be a very interesting exercise.

So I asked myself, "Self, what would make this more interesting?" And I answered myself, "Self, see if your old Canon S-70 is still in working order." After rummaging around for a while I found it. I charged the battery and dropped it and voila the doggone thing was working. Just to make it more interesting I also found the first CF card I bought, a Kodak card with a whopping 192 meg capacity. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but it was a lot.

Now some comments about the S-70. Remember this was a 2004 camera. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. First, the screen is tiny. I had to wear my reading glasses to use it. Second, it was top of the line for this camera type when it came out. In retrospect, it is interesting to remember what nice photos you can produce with a camera like this. Third, the highest ISO setting was 400. Can you believe that, 400!! Well there was a good reason for that. The high ISO performance was pretty bad, and I figure 800 would have been abysmal and Canon didn't want to deal with poor performance. Still at the time it was introduced, it was considered to be pretty good.

So armed with a tripod (sorry, Lynn, I wanted to get exactly the same frame for comparison sake) I headed to the airport and started shooting, looking for something to best show the noise. I shot one at ISO 50 and one at ISO 400. As you can see from the comparison photo, the noise in the 400 example (bottom) is very noticeable. Look at them in "original" size. These are 1:1 crops with no resampling.

So, what did I learn? Well, we are spoiled rotten with our current cameras and their performance. I have to admit that being spoiled rotten is lots of fun. Second, with judicious use of light and camera settings, I was able to get acceptable photos in the old days with the S-70. Third, this was quite a bit of fun.

I went back into my Lightroom and found that I had over 7000 images taken with the S-70. This is one of my favorites, a photo of Ginny. http://www.pbase.com/johncrossphotography/image/50055671)