Noisy Ninja Rabbits!

so, i just took delivery of my new Nikon D300. i've been listing lots of old junk on eBay that apparently someone likes! subsequently, i've raised enough money to offset the cost of buying the D300 and decided to take the plunge.

the D300 is a wonderful camera and i'm not going to post a D200 image here to taunt you with. instead you'll have to wait until later this week when i shoot with carly erin to see what it can really produce. low noise, 12 megapixels, and a really amazing 51-point autofocus system that will probably give me a lot more flexibility to choose where the camera focuses without having to move the AF areas to the eyes, then hold and recompose.

so, i spent the night tonight kicking the tires, so to speak. i use a Photoshop Plugin called Noise Ninja a lot to help smooth out some high-ISO shots and also, to eliminate some noise from the shadow areas of certain shots i do in the studio. Noise Ninja works best and fastest when you have the appropriate noise profiles for your camera. i assumed that the NN guys would have a set of profiles for the D300 at this point, but there wasn't a set available at their site. However, simple instructions on creating your own profiles are available at their site, so i thought i'd give it a shot. i printed the calibration sheet, set up the camera on a tripod and put a softbox directly behind and slightly above the camera. then i fired away, maintaining the same exposure for all the different ISOs that the camera can shoot at. This is a bit tricky especially at ISO 6400 where the studio light is at its lowest setting and the lens is stepped down to f/22!

in any event, i finally have profiles for each ISO setting and the results of reducing noise at ISO 3200 and above are really wonderful. i can absolutely shoot at ISO 1600, capture plenty of ambient light and still get low noise and really outstanding color rendition. this was not possible before a camera like this came along.

i've sent my profile images to the Noise Ninja folks, but if you want to download my noise profiles for the D300, i will make them available here:

Noise Ninja Profiles for Nikon D300

in order to install them, follow these instructions here and you'll be on your way!