I have a couple of wildlife shots I captured this week that turned out very noisy due to the high ISO I was using.
I’m new to using a telephoto lens and have reached a bit of a problem. All of my wildlife photos during the golden hour seem to be coming out pretty noisy… the lens restricts my aperture to 5.6, my shutter ideally should remain 1/500 or higher, which leaves me only with increasing the ISO if I want more light in my photo. Am I understanding this correctly? Any suggestions would be great.
I’m shooting with a Nikon D7000 on a AF-S Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR lens.
If you don’t want to buy a much more expensive and larger lens (or a new camera). You have only the option to raise the ISO if you want to avoid in-motion unsharpness. Apart from that you can add external light. But on wildlife this is probably not the thing to do. If the animal is resting and you have time, you can try AFTER your save shots to reduce shutter speed to 1/250 or something like that. This is often for not that quickly moving animals enough.
I’m not sure, if you really want to crop that far, you showed or if this just for demonstration reasons (it’s tighter than a 100%). On high ISO captures I would try to avoid too tight crops definitely. On top I would avoid to raise exposure or shadows to far. This pushes noise.
A bit of noise looks to me by the way always more natural, than a totally denoised picture. A bit of noise also improves the impression of sharpness.
The rule about the slowest acceptable shutter speed being numerically equal to 1/f in millimeters is only applicable if there is no in-body image stabilization and if you are limited to one shot (i.e., cannot select the least blurry one from several shots).
Here is a photo of a long-tailed shrike I took today in blue hour at 1/15s, with the equivalent focal length of 533 mm. I.e., the photo exceeded the rule by 5 stops of shutter speed, thanks to the relatively still subject. That’s on a Nikon Coolpix P1100.
This is a crop of the in-camera JPEG with exposure boosted in GIMP and color temperature shifted - just to show something, as I don’t intend to spend time editing this:
DT 5.4 non-AI denoising methods. BTW, I can hand hold my 300mm Nikon lens at 1/20th of a second because of lens stabilization. The rule of 1/f can be ignored because of stabilization. More light to sensor reduces the noise. A tiger sitting still probably could be photographed at 1/60th of a second to reduce noise.
Yes, this can work out well, but often it doesn’t. With a long tele every movement weighs heavy. The lens movement is nowadays the smaller problem thanks to stabilisation. But shaking leaves in the wind, moving animals and people can’t be solved by them. Motion blur is in my eyes a very annoying thing on a picture, even when the main subject isn’t affected.
That’s why I said, first make the safety shots then reduce shutter speed.
Fellow D7000 user here. The struggle is real I love it, but it’s not good in low light compared to newer models.
Something that took me a while to get straight in my head was that ISO itself does not change the amount of light hitting the sensor at all. In digital cameras, it amplifies the electrical signal from the sensor up to a certain ISO (better cameras can do this to higher ISOs and I think the D7000 does this up to ISO 800) and beyond that it changes the digital value recorded, which the same thing post-processing does when you lift the exposure.
So the noise has already happened. It just gets amplified by ISO along with the image. Aperture and shutter speed are really the only improve the situation. The only other suggestion I can make is not to crop too much. When you scale up a heavily cropped image, the noise gets scaled with it and becomes much more intrusive.
DT 5.4 default denoise (profiled) will strip out the chroma noise quickly enough. You can stack another instance of the module to remove the luma noise, but I find the blobby smoothness that results looks worse: (others here are much better than me at this, though)
In situations like this, simply use the descending shutter speed technique. Start with a safe shutter speed, which with VR would be closer to 1/320. Take a few shots, then move down to 1/200, then 1/100, and probably 1/60 if you can support your camera well, such as sitting down balanced on your bag.
If you can take at least six shots at 1/100, you would very likely get at least one sharp shot. On the D7000 try enabling quiet shutter mode too. And 1/100 will give you five stops over 1/500.
For example, take your owl shot. You’ve got it at 1/800 - way too high. For a static owl, even without taking it to the extreme, you could have easily gotten a shot at 1/200. That’s a two-stop difference, so you’d be shooting at ISO 800 vs ISO 3200. In that case, the noise would be hardly noticeable. If it was perched there for several minutes, then you might have even gotten a pretty sharp shot at 1/100, and there’d really be no noticeable noise at all at normal viewing sizes.
You’re also cropping too much. Maybe you did that to show the effect but there’s really no need to crop that much. It looks overcropped. Show some more of the environment instead:
I’m using PR5 now and started with 4 (bought it when there was a free upgrade to 5 on offer). When I first started with it, I was getting similar, plastic looking results that I didn’t like. I worked on a preset I called ;light luma noise’ that still preserves some of the grain and I think looks more natural. It’s not perfect, but I can certainly get better results from it than with native DT.
I’d share the DNG file here, but it’s 51MB (one of the downsides of working with the DNGs it produces. Apparently PR6 has added a more compressed DNG format but I haven’t upgraded). This is an unmodified export of the whole DNG for comparison.
Besides the great tips given below, you might want to search the net for techniques to stabilize your body and your camera. This will probably give yoy another stop leeway.
Did not do much specific here, I would be happy catching these creatures in a picture, never mind them being technically more or less good, I would be happy.
That is a very sensible approach. It may prove tricky to perform with wildlife unless the animal is relaxed and sitting still.
I also shoot bracketed exposure shots a lot and depending on how this is setup it can result in a range of shutter speeds to achieve the different exposures. Then possibly the brightest image without movement blur might be the least noisy image and best to edit.
Nikon could be set to do +3F 1.0EV to capture one shot at 1/320, 1/160 and then 1/80. This would be achieved by setting the initial shutter speed to 1/320. I just tested this on my Nikon D7100 so I expect the same could be achieved on the D7000. You would also set the camera to continuous drive shooting mode.
My processing steps for this owl shot.
1. I used the picker in the exposure module to correct the under exposure
2. I used the auto tune levels picker in AgX followed by the pivot target output picker.
3. I activated hot pixels to default values to detect by 3 neighbors
4. I activated raw denoise module which was too aggressive so I set the threshold to 0.004
5. I acyivated capture sharpening in the demosaic module.
6. I activated denoise (profiled) to default values (I personally could accept this level of noise)
7. I selected the supplied preset for sharpen demosaicing AA filter found in the diffuse or sharpen module. This has brought out noise in the green leaves. There could be a number of approaches to limiting the sharpening to just the owl. However, I used the details threshold slider set to +60%. This slider is found by simply clicking on the drawn mask icon.
8. I personally could accept the noise level at this stage. However, for the exercise I have activated astrophoto denoise at default values. I have used the details threshold slider set to -60% to protect the details in the image while denoising the smoother areas of the picture.
9. The result is an image that has the noise under control to my liking.
10. I now activate local contrast module to default values to improve the contrast.
11. In AgX I move the pivot target output slider to the right to achieve the final brightness of the image. _DSC2403.NEF.xmp (12.0 KB)
BTW, my bracketed exposure technique described in the previous post would have produced captures at 1/800, 1/400, and 1/200
Here is an edit in DT5.5 using AI-denoising in my inexperienced hands. The result is smoother if you go pixel peaking at 100%. I would say the denoising with this AI option is arguably superior to just non-AI denoising. Something to look forward to in DT 5.6.
2026-06-06 05:06:19 is before the sunrise (it’s near Cebu), but photographers disagree about the end of the blue hour. My teacher says “not blue hour”, as it ends when the sun is 4 degrees below the horizon according to her definition. Wikipedia gives this example in the Blue hour - Wikipedia article, consistent with the statement that the blue hour ends with the sunrise and begins with the sunset, without any margin:
So it is blue hour under the definition from Wikipedia but not under the definition that I heard in my photography class.
The light conditions later this morning are more accurately described as “enough clouds near the horizon to make sure that the golden hour does not exist”. That light that you see is not the direct sunlight.
Gemini says (edited for clarity by consolidating parts of several responses):
I love it, but it’s not good in low light compared to newer models.
