Art of the Image: Nikon D5000 - Shooting the D5000 at ISO 3200

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Nikon D5000 - Shooting the D5000 at ISO 3200

One of the things I've been evaluating while shooting my new Nikon D5000 is the high ISO performance.

As I mentioned in my article and video, First Impressions After Shooting The D5000 For A Few Days, most online sources have indicated that the Nikon D5000 has about a stop better high ISO performance than the Nikon D300. In addition, the consensus also seems to be that the D5000 has better detail at higher ISO settings than the D300.

To get a feel for how the D5000 handles at high ISO, I decided to set it to ISO 3200 and shoot a series of photos of my daughter and various things around the house using available light. The light is mixed lighting, part sunlight and part compact flourescent bulbs, fairly typical of what you would find indoors.

Here's some of the ISO 3200 images I shot. All are shot with the new Nikon 35mm f1.8G on the D5000, in RAW, and processed in Lightroom. I've processed them the way I normally process any photos in Lightroom, so a lot of them have had vignetting applied... i.e. don't be thinking that's the how the Nikon 35mm f1.8G vignettes. :-)

I haven't done any side by side comparisons with my Nikon D300 yet. I just wanted to see what my impressions were of how the D5000 does at high ISO before I started doing a lot of pixel peeping and comparisons against other DSLR cameras.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with the high ISO performance of the D5000. From what I've seen so far, I'd have to agree that the Nikon D5000 is about a stop better than the Nikon D300, maybe more. Perhaps more importantly, the D5000 does look like it retains more detail at higher ISO settings than the D300.

Have a look for yourself. Click on any of the D5000 photos below to see a larger image. You can also view the full resolution files at my Nikon D5000 - Shooting the D5000 at ISO 3200 Flickr page.