Hi All,

I'm still exploring my new Canon Digital Rebel and something has been concerning me.

I've wanted to do some nice waterfall photography and the consensus seems to be that just after sunrise, just before sunset or on a day that's overcast is better, especially with long exposures.

So off I went hiking today to a local nature preserve, hiked down to the bottom of a waterfall, got the tripod setup and started shooting.

I was mostly experimenting and tried exposures from 1 second to 30 seconds (with the smallest apature, I think it was f/22). I did this at ISO 100.

Now, most of the shots came out "good" (but not great). Mostly composition, some blown highlights, etc. But one thing I noticed was noise! Lots of it!

Well, ok, I'm not sure if it's "alot" or not, but it was very noticable. Running it through Noise Ninja clears alot of it up.

I guess my question is... Is this normal? It was about a half hour before sunset, partly cloudy with some tree cover, iso 100, with exposures between 1 and 30 seconds.

I guess one thing that concerns me is that I want to do some night photography. Does this mean I'm going to get alot of noise regardless?

Thanks.

Damn, I knew it wouldn't be long before someone asked a serious question.
I'm resisting the temptation to say anything about ear plugs, and leaving it for someone with intelligence to answer ;-)
(",)

noise is a problem with Canon and long exposures....the longer the exposure the worse, generally, the noise is....i try to avoid a large sections of flat ,no detail, sections, i.e. a flat blue sky....
try limiting your long exposures to less than a couple of seconds (which is usually plenty long enough to get the milky look)..
i've got a canon G5 and i do get noise but can usually clean it up with filters etc.

Is the noise reduction option switched on ?  Find it buried deep in menu the menu somewhere as a shooting parameter.

You will know if it is straight away because the camera will take as long to process the image as the exposure time. ie if the exposure was 30 secs then in camera processing will take 30 secs for each shot. Same applies to the G5.

What the camera is doing is taking a second exposure without opening the shutter therefore getting a black image with only noise on it. This it then blends with the first image in difference mode. Voila you have an image with a lot less noise.

HTH 

Thank you all for the responses.

I did notice the noise reduction option and was wondering how that worked. I'll give that a go and see if that takes care of most of the noise.

I just thought at iso 100, even at 20-30 seconds, that it should be relatively noise free. I need to do some night shots and see how bad off it'll be.

Is any of this, noise-wise, related to the fact that I'm using the lens that came with the kit or is it only the camera?

I would have to disagree about noise being a problem with Canon it will be more obvious on a non DLSR  Richard is quite correct about the menu and the options to improve the long exposures

The option suggested is very useful when taking long exposure shots (in bulb mode). One of the big problems with long exposure shots at night is that you sometimes get “hot pixels” – these show up as coloured specks and are particularly noticeable against the black sky in nighttime shots. By switching this function on (to 1, rather than 0) , the camera takes two images, one with the shutter open and one with the shutter closed. It uses the second image (with the shutter closed, which takes the same amount of time as the exposure of the first image) to deal with the hot pixels in the first image, by subtracting the noise from the second image from the first. This is very useful, and it’s incredibly effective – although it does mean that you have to wait twice as long for your shot. Remember to switch it off when you don’t need it. It’s worth noting that the noise reduction will only kick in on exposures of 30 seconds or more

However, hidden in those menus are some other features that can be very useful in certain circumstances – the most useful of these apart from  the long exposure noise reduction,  are shutter-curtain sync and mirror lockup. Try them lockup will for example allow the main cause of unsharp images the vibration caused by the mirror locking up you set that option press the shutter once and then again to expose the shot..

Hi danob,

Thank you for that. I have been using mirror lockup and this has helped somewhat.

What does the shutter-curtain sync do, btw? I've been confused by this. What should I set it to for long exposures?

Thanks again!

Hi Melan,

 This technique is great when you want to say get headlights from traffic to project forward That's what you get with First Curtain Sync. It fires the flash at the top of the exposure, and when that exposure is a significant portion of a second, the streaks from moving subjects continue forward of the flash. Rollover to see the effect of Second Curtain Sync, which fires the flash at the instant the shutter ends the exposure. The "curtain" phrase well that's an obsolete carry-over from film SLRs that had twin curtain shutters.the rollerover effect would give a trailing light