Mr. and Mrs. Clause have graced our hearth at this time of year for decades, the result of a ceramics class taken by Mrs. Ed when we were in our youth. I wanted to see how the NEX 6 handled some long exposures, so I set her up on the tripod and in manual mode, set the exposure for 8 seconds at f/5.6. Because I was using a tripod, I was able to keep the ISO to a low 100.
I was pretty impressed with the sharpness and lack of noise in this image. In-camera noise reduction was ON for the NEX, which added 8 more seconds to the processing time, but paid off. Here’s a 100% crop of Mrs. Santa:
You might notice some mottling of color in her white hair, but I think that’s the reflection of the colored tree lights that were just a few feet away, as can be seen in the full scene above. Her complexion and red coat are pretty smooth and even and the details are very good. Overall, I’m pleased.
But 8 seconds is not that long to test a camera’s handling of long exposure noise. So I plan to run some longer tests soon. So far, so good.
2 Guys Photo 