Something Crazy, just for fun: Night Safari Animals

[zackiedawg]

Big caveat here for pixel peepers: There will be noise. Just a warning! For anyone who knows what shooting action handheld at night without flash or external lighting requires, I don't need to go into much more detail - but for those who don't, note that the minimum ISO I could even possibly get away with was 25,600, at apertures of F5.6...an F4 lens wouldn't have helped much, because my shutter speeds were at 1/100 or less much of the time - all I would have gotten from the slightly faster aperture would have been a little more shutter speed, and still less than technically needed. Heck, an F2.8 lens wouldn't have helped much - I might have been able to drop to ISO12,800 and increase my shutter speeds to 1/300 or so. This is the type of shooting that really should be done with a top full frame sensor and an F2.8 lens...and even then, not many try this type of challenge.



Disney's Animal Kingdom park just recently started operating night hours, until 11pm. They have a fun safari ride through their animal savannah on large trucks - and they now have a slightly shorter route available after 8pm for night safari rides (in order to let some animals who are not active at night have less interruption). They mostly leave the area free of artificial lighting - there are a few spots where more distant light from nearby areas of the park have some bleed-over, so rather than cool blue moonlight, in some spots you get a bit of a yellowish light cast visible...and one part of the savannah they have some artificial light in the distance for a bit of a faux 'African sunset' look - it's about 100 yards from the animals themselves.



What's interesting about night animal shooting for me:

1. The AF was actually quite good - despite dark of night and little to no definition or contrast on the subjects, shooting from a moving vehicle, handheld. I stuck with AF-S, spot focus at medium - I had only a handful of misses - the rest were able to find the target and lock focus. No matter the 'low light rating' of a focus system, focusing in low light has a lot more to do with knowing how to find the right points for the focus system to lock onto...the A6300 is only rated at EV 0 in low light focusing, but I was shooting in conditions of -6 to -8 EV, and still able to find focus.

2. A funny thing about shooting very high ISO at night...it starts to look like day. The shots look significantly brighter and with more visible light than was actually visible to the eye...at those high sensitivities, the noise is cranked way up but the sensor is able to take a dark navy blue sky and turn it light blue - amplifying the minimal amount of trace light. For those who shoot at night often, I don't need to explain this - but there may be many here who have never shot at night with cranked up ISO levels like this, and might not realize how much more visible things become in the frame, when your naked eye can barely see anything...so I just wanted to explain this for those who aren't too familiar with this type of shooting.

3. I had a fair amount of flubbed shots - not due to poor focus, or me not framing...but mostly due to the fact that I was shooting from a moving truck and I wasn't the one driving - so I couldn't control when to slow down, or know when we were going to hit a bump or hole. So many times, I'd get focus on the animal, and hit the shutter, but end up with a blurry mess because my shutter speeds were 1/40 to 1/100 and the truck's movement was too much to deal. Stabilization helps a great deal when handholding 70mm or more at shutter speeds under 1/100, but it can't do anything to counter a vehicle's movement!

4. Remember this isn't just high ISO shooting - it's high ISO shooting in very dark underexposed conditions. So unlike setting ISO to 25,600 in a decently lit house and getting a perfectly exposed shot of my cat, where the noise is very low and detail excellent, these shots are in the worst of conditions with extreme underexposure at maximum ISO. This is where noise lives - but I'm not much afraid of noise. For me, the key was whether with such high noise and such underexposure, could the sensor still show any details? I'm happy to report yes - you could still make out colors, skin textures, hair, eyes, fur...even through all the noise.

Anyway, on to the noisy, grainy, super-high ISO A6300 and FE70-300mm photos of African animals out at night, with no flash, from a moving truck, AT NIGHT! - all shots posted at 1400 pixels on the long side if you click the originals:

This is about as dark as it gets - couldn't really see the hippos much by eye - but cranking up to ISO51,200 and F5.6 at 1/125 shutter speed, you could make out the hippos lined along the island bank, even enough to see their reddish colors around the ears, eyes, and head

Some cattle and antelope eating out on the open savannah. You can see traces of the warmer light here, from the fake sunset lighting far off to the left. ISO25,600 here.

This little guy was close - and the truck slowed down in case he darted towards it - so I was able to slow the shutter speed down a lot at ISO25,600 and get a better exposure. Again, the warmer light cast on the ground is from the fake sunset lighting about 200 yards away

A herd of wildebeest, with a few thompson's gazelle behind, grazing on the savannah (ISO25,600). There was a light over a gazebo about 100 feet to the left where the private safari trucks stop for lunch and dinner overlooking the savannah..that's what's providing that puddle of light.

This giraffe was walking along right beside the truck, so I had to shoot up at him against the night sky. Amazing how dark the sky was to the eye, but how the high ISO lets you still see cloud details that I didn't even know were there! (ISO25,600)

A section of the theme park bleeds some light from over the crest, enough to just hit the backs of the elephants - I was moving in the truck and the elephants were walking along too - so double-movement here which blurred the feet at my slow shutter speeds (ISO25,600)




When I got off the safari ride, I decided to take a photo of some of the village theming area, just to give an idea of how dark it was...this is at F4, and ISO2,500, 1/60 handheld, exposed off the regular lighting - you can see the sky is a deep dark blue to violet...not providing very much light for seeing animals!

As always, comments, questions, and critique welcomed. I thought it might be fun to post something that breaks the rules - not the best, most noise-free, most perfectly detailed shots - but something really challenging and different and rarely posted.



--
Justin
galleries: www.pbase.com/zackiedawg

 

[D Cox]

Very impressive. You must have been thinking fast all through the ride.

I have photos taken on Ansco ASA 500 slide film in the 1960s, in daylight. That speed made it possible to hand-hold a 400mm lens. The quality you show here at ISO 25K is better.

That is over 5 stops faster.

 

[Kev The Doc]

Thanks for sharing.

Assume this is using your now trusty 70-300G? I'm impressed with it's ability to focus in such light.

Are these OOC jpegs? Did you try any raw shots with post processing to compare?

You mention that it's important to pick the point of focus, so assume you look for features and any slight contrast that still exists in such low light?

Lots of questions as usual

 

[zackiedawg]

Very impressive. You must have been thinking fast all through the ride.

Thank you. It's definitely tougher than the day ride - not only the lack of light, but you don't really know what animal you'll see until you're quite close because it's so dark. During the day, I am looking ahead and can see 200 feet away that the elephants are in the water playing ahead...at night, sometimes it was like, Oh, there's a bongo 10 feet away that I am just noticing!

I have photos taken on Ansco ASA 500 slide film in the 1960s, in daylight. That speed made it possible to hand-hold a 400mm lens. The quality you show here at ISO 25K is better.

That is over 5 stops faster.

Amazing, isn't it? Film guys who tried higher speed film will likely have more appreciation at these stupid ISO levels cameras can achieve today. Even the fact that full frames can shoot comfortably at ISO12,800 and with noise levels lower than 800 speed film back in the day, they can crank up over 100,000...that the A6300 for me at least is still usable in a pinch for situations like this all the way to 51,200 is amazing.

 

[zackiedawg]

Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for looking, and comments.

Assume this is using your now trusty 70-300G? I'm impressed with it's ability to focus in such light.

Indeed it was the lens I used. I actually considered using the 70-200mm because of the F4, but in the end, I figured it was going to be extreme anyway, so that 1 stop really wasn't going to do all that much...and it was a chance to test an important factor that many want to know, which is whether the slower 70-300mm aperture would hinder low light focus. It's pretty impressive actually how well it can focus in almost no light - it certainly can't focus continuously or track, and isn't as instantaneous as it is in good daylight, but it's still well under 1 second and grabs focus accurately with a very good hit rate in awful conditions.

Are these OOC jpegs? Did you try any raw shots with post processing to compare?

I didn't bother with RAW this time...maybe a future night safari I might give it a try for fun. My experience in early tests with the A6300 though is that when pushing ISO to 25,600 and up, there's not a whole lot more to get out of the RAW. At 12,800 there's some room to clean up and get a few more details, but 25,600 and up are purely emergency modes when conditions are this low and underexposed...and JPG seems to handle decently well compared to processed RAWs at these ISOs. The only processing done was that I did crop these a bit, and I did play with the colors a bit to boost back some color lost from the extreme ISOs.

You mention that it's important to pick the point of focus, so assume you look for features and any slight contrast that still exists in such low light?

Exactly. In each of the shots, you can get an idea of what I was looking for...the hippos at night were barely visible, but when boosting the ISO to 51,200 I was able to notice the lighter pinkish patches around the ears and head - so I pointed the flex spot focus on the ears which had enough pink to purple transition and shadow definitions for the AF system to recognize. For the feeding cattle, there was just enough differential in the patterns of the coat with the boosted ISO for the AF system to see the white/brown transition lines. For the little beige antelope, the black eye was the most logical thing. For the wildebeest, that little patch of white behind the ears with the dark ears in front was a perfect place to put the flex spot. On the giraffe, the eye being dark put showing the specs of headlight glint was enough to pinpoint the focus, though the neckline against the sky also would have worked. You get the idea...just looking for those dark/light transition points, glints, shadow spots, etc that show a clear delineation of light to dark which is what an AF system needs - even in night conditions there's usually something you can force-feed to the AF system to allow it to function properly and get focus!

 

[Kev The Doc]

Yeah, performance at extreme iso's seems to be one of the areas the 6300 outperforms the 6000, particularly when pulling detail from underexposed areas where the 6000 is prone to to a terrible blue cast. I'll add low light shooting to my "project list" and compare ooc jpeg to raw and post processing .

 

[zackiedawg]

Yeah, performance at extreme iso's seems to be one of the areas the 6300 outperforms the 6000, particularly when pulling detail from underexposed areas where the 6000 is prone to to a terrible blue cast. I'll add low light shooting to my "project list" and compare ooc jpeg to raw and post processing .

Very much true - this is a big advantage for the A6300 over the A6000 - while I always considered that camera very good at high ISO, if you really pushed it, especially at ISO12,800, there was usually a bit of blue cast and blue noise to deal with. While I could scrub it out, it was still there - and going higher to 25,600 was something I pretty much avoided - 12,800 was the upper limit for the A6000 for me. With the A6300, there's no color noise issues and no blue cast at 12,800 and it's actually quite usable for every day shooting at that range for me...while even 25,600 and 51,200 can still be used - and as with the above I wasn't fighting blue cast or purple blotch noise - and was still able to pull up the natural colors on the animals through all the noise, so the detail as well as color information was still there - amazing at those levels.

 

[QVee]

Justin,

now we can use the combo as our seeing guide in the dark, if we needed it )

I have not tested that hi ISO but seeing your post I feel better aabout using it in an emergency situation

TFS