A noisy picture that meant the world...

Until last October I lived in Tucson, AZ. After four years of grad school I decided to spend an outlandish amount of money on camera equipment: $400 on an E-510 two-lens kit and the real luxury item, $225 on a Zuiko 70-300. I knew the E-510's limitations but it was what I could afford, and after doing my research it seemed like the best camera for the money. I still think it is: it's a fantastic imaging machine, if you can keep it at low ISO. For those who've not shot an E-510-era camera, they all band badly in the shadows at ISO 800+, have very restricted dynamic range, and are only saved from shadow noise by a propensity to push shadows so low in tonality that you don't see it too badly.

I was walking home from the University of Arizona near sunset along a dusty windswept neighborhood road, like every road in Arizona, when I saw a male Gila woodpecker, Southern Arizona's most iconic bird, bringing food to its nest in a west-facing hole. I watched it waiting for an opportunity to get a picture, and as the light faded I cranked up the ISO as the light turned deep orange-red from the west, a light that every Arizonan knows and loves. 200... 400... I miss a few shots thanks to the 70-300's awful AF... 800... well, hell, I know ISO 1600 is a bandy, noisy mess but I want my shot.

Finally he gave me the shot, holding in front of his hole long enough to give the 70-300's cantankerous autofocus enough time to lock on. I took it at ISO 1600, f/5.6, 1/250, with the 510 set to my usual settings: Contrast -2, Sharpness -2, Saturation +2, Noise Filter Off. I brought it home and thought it was pretty enough, gave the OOC jpeg a quick pass through NeatImage, downsized it to 1024 pixels across, and posted it on the web to post on a thread here about technical image quality and didn't give it any more thought.

***

Everyone has a person in their life that they'd move mountains to help out. Sometimes it's a lover, sometimes it's a family member, sometimes it's "just" a friend. Mine is a former student of mine at the University of Arizona who became a friend, a brilliant, shy, intuitive, inquisitive, kind, and generous to a fault person who has the misfortune of having serious issues with major depression, but who always insists on trying to make your life better even when she's having a great deal of trouble. This week she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for inpatient treatment.

As soon as I heard about this I wrote her a letter. I work in the urban hellhole of DC now, but am between permanent homes and sleeping on a friend's floor and commuting four hours a day, and don't have access to most of my pictures; all I've got is what is posted on the web and what's on the little SSD of my work computer. But she likes my photography; she's got a bunch of prints in her house. On a whim I went to Kinko's and printed out two 4x6's: one of a rainbow above Gates' Pass, another iconic Tucson scene, and one of that little ISO 1600 shot of a woodpecker -- taken a few blocks from where we both lived, in the town that she's cut off from for a little while and that I so dearly love and miss. Both were printed from 1024x768 versions saved on the web.

I sent my letter and pictures to her by overnight mail. She got them today and called me immediately from the hospital to tell me that my letter and that picture of the woodpecker, in particular, had meant the world to her, and had done so much to brighten up her day. Hearing that -- who cares about noise levels or banding or sensor dynamic range? Yeah, sometimes those things matter... but sometimes a picture means a whole lot more to someone than its technical quality, and sometimes we worry way too much about technical quality and not enough about what's in the picture.

E-510, 70-300mm lens at 300mm f/5.6, ISO 1600, shutter speed 1/250ish