Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers

112 ISO and Noise

Using Noise Creatively

Using Noise Creatively

Have a hankering to be a pointillist like painter Georges

Seurat? Sure you can use a Photoshop filter to achieve

almost any effect (including pointillism), but how

much more authentic is it to use high levels of noise to

make the individual pixels in your photos apparent?

In the previous section, I wrote that you probably want

to use as low an ISO as possible to keep noise down. In

other words, noise is bad. But there’s another way of

looking at this: maybe noise is good.

The more noise in an image, the more you have at least

the illusion of being able to see the individual pixels

that make up a photo. Creating photos that seem to

show their pixilated origins is a case-in-point for the

good design principle of form following function. De

-

p

ending on the photo, some noisy pixels may enhance

the sense of sharing the scene with the photographer

(the photo on this page is an example). In other cases,

the noise inherent in the image can become part of the

design and aesthetic of the image (the photo on pages

104–105 is an example).

In many images, noise works well if it appears at dif

-

f

erent levels of intensity in some parts of the image,

113

ISO and Noise

With a composition that included the white ball of the ...