In-Camera Noise Reduction

Night photographers seem to be fascinated with how different digital cameras perform under long exposures. The goal has always been to find how long the camera can shoot before it introduces noise. In fact, I jumped over to the Dark Side four years ago with the D60 because it seemed to be the first digital SLR that could shoot clean images longer than 30 seconds. Today, the D60's four-minute limit pales in comparison with it's successors.

There seem to be six popular approaches to solving the problem of long exposure digital noise.

1. Keep the exposures short.
2. Keep the camera as cool as possible without freezing it.
3. Use noise reduction post-procssing software, such as Noise Ninja.
4. Use in-camera dark frame subtraction
5. Use dark frame subtraction in post-processing
6. Keep buying the latest and greatest cameras.

(photo: Joe Reifer)

At the Night Photography Conference at Mono Lake last week, Joe Reifer and Mark Jaremko conducted some long exposure tests with the Canon EOS 5D and the 1DsMk2.

Joe has posted some interesting findings of the 5D noise reduction on the Nocturnes Message Board. We can only hope that a 1DsMk2 report will be forthcoming, too.