The photo above is a larger, more complete version of the cropped Tulips #2 image below. As you can see, the digital noise-level is virtually non-existent (explained in the post).
I know — I already sort of “closed out” 2022 when I posted My Favorite Photos of 2022 in December, last year. But the truth is we did take another short trip to southern California to visit our eldest son and his family for the holidays. And normally, even if I take pictures on such a visit, I generally do not share those publicly on the Internet.
However, as a part of this visit, our daughter-in-law arranged for us all to visit a holiday lights display at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge — and I did take my camera along. The variety and use of lights technology at this show promised to be interesting and unique. At the same time, shooting in the dark without using a tripod to stabilize the camera for night shooting (which would have been very unsafe around such large crowds) also presented some technical challenges. And that provided me with an opportunity to test some aspects of my camera that I had not spent much time on — yet.
What I wanted to do was really push my use of higher ISO settings in a real setting; I would definitely need that capability to be able to capture usable images of the light show while hand-holding the camera (which would require higher shutter speeds to avoid blur caused by camera movement). My at-home testing had suggested my newer camera (about a year-ish old) was capable of shooting at much higher ISO settings than my previous one without causing too much digital noise. In addition, recent software improvements have also proved to do a much better job of removing unwanted noise during post-processing. I’ve marked this blog post (also) as a tutorial because I do describe some of what I did to test this out.
The light show was organized into separate numbered stations. I didn’t keep track of the station names or numbers but we more or less followed the normal sequence and my photos are pretty much in that order. The first station we saw was what I (mentally) named Tulip Fields (for kind of obvious reasons).
You can see that I chose a moderate f-stop for the photos to allow a reasonable amount of light and also to help to focus the image from the front to about 2/3 back (the last third is softer and not fully in focus). More importantly, I initially chose a high ISO of 3200 — five f-stops of additional sensitivity so that the camera would choose a shutter speed that I could probably hand-hold successfully.
After a quick back-of-the camera review of the first photo, I was a bit concerned that even an ISO of 3200 was not quite enough so on my second shot I increased the ISO by almost 1/3 stop more to 4000. It was at the second field, Tulips #2, that I also realized that the bulbs were slowly fading between different colors. So, I positioned myself where I thought I could stand fairly still and shot a series of images (waiting a bit between shots to allow the colors to shift). I did manage to not move too much between shots which you can see in the small movements between the slides here.
We stopped at several other stations noted below: The platform with interactive columns mounted nearby that seemed to change colors based upon where people touched them seemed fun, especially for the younger set (none of the folks in this image is from our group). Nearby was the very starry night, at least within the boundaries of the supporting arches.
That was followed by lots of illuminated stained glass, formed into a very small house (shack). Very interesting was the photo-realistic moon, apparently modeled from detailed photographs of Earth’s actual moon.
We came across a small illuminated forest in which the colors of the trees periodically changed as you watched.
Around this time of the evening, I stopped using my full camera (maybe I was tired of carrying it around or maybe the battery was dead – I don’t really remember). So I took a final few photos using my phone. These two images were taken at two different stations. The first was another interactive station where people (mostly children) would walk around the platform (maybe stomp around) and the lights would change to light them and the tree they were circling to change color. The other was a kind of park with benches, except the the benches seemed to be fully lit from within while also being illuminated by standing lamps. [On these camera photos, I let the camera app control everything except focus –exposure, shutter speed, and ISO- so I don’t show that metadata here since I had no hand in setting it.]
The last station (number 8, as you can see below) was very interesting but was hard to capture. It seemed to be a portion of the woods that was being lit not only by some color background lights but also by simulated Fire Flies or Lightning Bugs. I first took another photo but I could tell that, as a still photo, no one could tell what was intended to be shown. So I tried shooting a short (9 second) vertical video, which did show what was happening.
Click the image once and it will start and continue to loop (click it again to stop it). If you turn up the sound you will also hear simulated bird and insect sounds (and a bit of crowd noise and some other, unidentified background sound). Overall. for me, it provided an amazing and quite realistic effect.
After that, we paid a brief visit to the gift shop (don’t remember if anyone bought anything) and then started the trek back to where we’d parked the car and headed back to the grandkid’s home.
In terms of my experiment with higher ISO, it worked better than I expected. The images produced did have a tendency to be only slightly noisy (usable as shot, I felt). But I continued my testing by applying modern denoising software and that seemed to clear the noise completely – at least at the levels of ISO that I applied. Of course, as is often the case, your mileage may vary.
Thank you for visiting my blog and especially if you stayed all the way to the end of the post. If you live in this SoCal area, or are traveling there during the end of year holidays, you might find it an interesting place to visit. We certainly did.
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