Sony a1 high ISO performance and how to minimize noise in any digital capture

After quickly assembling and setting-up the Sony a1, I headed outside to what turned out to be the quietest feeder in town. This Eastern Gray Squirrel didn’t even stay for long. This image was made with the Sony a1 set to APS-C mode and the Sony 600mm f/4 with the 2X teleconverter making a staggering effective focal length of 1,800 mm. I was at just about minimum focusing distance.

This image shows almost no noise at 10,000 ISO, but it is important to observe that the image is mostly midtones through highlights with almost no dark shadows except the eyes, so one could argue that this is a calculated attempt to cover-up any weakness of the new Sony a1. I would argue that this is a full-frame capture, but since the camera was set to APS-C mode and I was set to compressed RAW to achieve the full 30FPS capture rate, the noise performance is quite remarkable. Add to that that I know I have always got more detail, color accuracy, and less noise when converting RAW images with Adobe Camera Raw which has not yet released an update for the new camera just yet (as mentioned in my Sony a1 review HERE, this may simply be user error while trying to get the most from Sony’s Imaging Edge Software).

To minimize noise with any digital camera be sure to understand and use the histogram to make sure your image is exposed correctly: the whites should reside at the right-hand side of the histogram, but should not be touching the edge to avoid over-exposing them and losing details. Since the camera sees and records light like our eyes, it can’t see or record darkness: it is imperative to remember this! Most vocal armchair warrior critics online consistently underexpose and use one of many available techniques to brighten their images after capture: every one of them will introduce noise into the image (particularly in the darkest areas or the shadows).

Since noise is magnified by cropping an image, it is best practice to avoid cropping much from the original capture. Again, this is something I have seen consistently from those vocal interweb armchair critics.