Heidi on the Patio

Heidi on the Patio
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

One of the major shortcomings of small digicams like my Canon Powershot S70 is that performance at high, or even medium, ISO settings is really poor. Noise is extreme.

However, I've found that in black and white, noise doesn't look so bad. It just looks like old-fashioned film grain.

Furthermore, black and white film photographers have long known that grain increases the impression of sharpness of an image. Fairly blurry photos, like this one, which was shot handheld at 1/5 of a second, can actually look sharp because the eye has sharp grain to lock onto.

I'm starting to develop this arty style with my S70 of shooting in low light with the ISO set to 400 (as high as it goes). Exposures are long and there's plenty of noise, but that's OK in black and white, and the "grain" rescues the blurry image. If you wan this look with a digital SLR, you'll need a higher ISO, like 3200.

Generally speaking you should always shoot digital images in color and convert to black and white in post-processing via channel mixing. This allows you the same control post-exposure that color filters do at exposure time with traditional black and white photography. I don't always follow my own advice, though. I let the camera desaturate this one.