As Obama is visiting Oslo to pick up his Nobel, the city is undergoing a total lockdown. Manholes are welded, roads are closed, security guards number in the thousands. I guess people won’t be seeing much of the president, even if he’s staying here for two days.

But, maybe you can spot him between his army of security goons?

Play my latest flash game here and post your results to facebook! My personal record is just over 1 seconds, but I got lucky.

All photos have been resized and have some pp done in Lightroom, very little if any noise reduction. I shot the event in JPGs with standard noise reduction.

The lighting was difficult, with lots of red ambient/spotlights and LED backlights. I had to keep the ISO between 2000 and maximum 5000 to keep my shutter speed up.

The variable lights made it hard to get consistant exposures (maybe some bracketing shooting would be cool?). But both over- and underexposed shots were possible to tweak to a certain degree.

All in all I found the 7D to be a good lowlight event camera. The autofocus is just kick-ass. I think I had less than 5 photos out of focus out of about 200! ISO performance is great and detail is good. Some photos, especially high ISO shots that were a bit off exposurewise were difficult to rescue. I’d reckon the 5DMk2 would have some more leverage here. But shooting in RAW would probably be beneficial if I’ve had the time to postprocess properly.

The Canon 17-55 IS lens is great for this kind of stuff. At low shutter speeds the stabilization really works well and is very welcome for low light stuff. The reach is a bit short for a concert lens though. Next time I’ll take the 70-200 f/2.8 IS, even if it might prove to be a bit long.

You can watch the whole set at flickr here. You can also see the EXIF info for each photo.

Basically (as I understand it) there is always more detail left in the RAW file when “exposing to the right”, ie. exposing so you just avoid burning out the hightlights. Feeding the sensor with more light can be more efficient than trying to shoot with as low ISO as possible. The examples in the article showed that instead of underexposing with a low ISO value, you’d get less noise if you’d overexpose on a higher ISO setting. I’m paraphrasing and simplifying, but the gist of it was that it’s better to lower your exposure in post-processing rather than trying to keep the ISO value as low as possible.

The test

I decided to try this out for myself on my Canon 40D. I’ve never been quite comfortable shooting with my 40D over ISO 400, as I’ve felt that the noise and loss of detail has been pretty obvious. I shot the scene of my poorly lit room with my Sigma 10-20 at f4.0 in Aperture mode, RAW. (Click images for 100%):

Both photos taken handheld with Sigma 10-20 at f4.0. Only adjusted white balance and exposure to match each other.

The first photo is taken with ISO400,f4,1/8 sec (no exp compensation, centerwheighted), the second on ISO800,f4,1/4sec (+1 stop exp comp). I only adjusted white balance and exposure to match each other in post – no noise reduction other than the default 25% color in Lightroom. Even at thumbnail size you can see that the ISO400 clearly is worse than the ISO800 shot.

There’s more detail, more even gradients, less blotches and smoother tones in the ISO800 photo. I even think the hightlights are better preserved with the “overexposed” ISO800 shot. It’s not stock material, but definitively useful and would stand up to more heavy post-processing.

OK, time for the 800-1600 battle. I’ve almost never used ISO 1600 on my 40D (and the expanded ISO3200 only a handful of times). This might change:

On the right (confusingly – sorry) you have your basic ISO800 shot with no exposure compensation. Just what the light meter in the 40D gave me. To the left the ISO1600 is clearly better, even though I did not do much exposure compensation (it might have been +2/3). I’d say that with a bit of careful noise reduction work and some heave white balancing I’d have a pretty descent, crappily lit indoor shot.

Conclusion

The high ISO settings on my Canon 40D don’t suck. By carefully adjusting exposure to keep your histogram to the right (and avoid burning out useful hightlights), you can get good, clean results on the highest ISO settings. I’ve always struggled to keep my ISO down, often resulting in the need to gain the exposure and getting lots of crappy noise, blotches and banding with it. I will definately work on my techniques when shooting low light stuff, and not worry too much about high ISO values. Now, how did I enable that ISO3200 setting again?

Our idea was to track the car with some sort of GPS technology. In the end we ended up with a pretty simple solution. The reporters are taking still photos with a GPS-enabled phone and uploads these to a flickr account. Then we take the geotagged RSS feed from flickr and cache it on our server and read it into a flash map. This map of Norway is a simplified, stylized graphic that is based on a real map that has pretty evenly distributed lat and long degrees.

My flash code parses the geo coordinates from the images and converts them to x and y positions on the map. Each photo becomes a time-stamped marker, giving us an approximate route that I use to calculate driving speed, length driven and gasoline used. Our tests showed it was pretty accurate – enough to give people an easy way of following the car as it zips across Norway.

The hardest parts of this project was converting lat and long degrees to x and y and getting reliable results. An accurate 2D map would probably have needed degrees that take curvature into consideration, but then it would probably be easier to use google maps API. But it wouldn’t look very cool.

Visit the P3sommer blog here!

The game was very quickly developed in just two days, and there are probably some bugs around. But what the heck/whack. It has become pretty popular on our web pages, boosting our traffic immensely over the past days.

A lot of the traffic comes from facebook, since the game allows you to post the score to your profile. The facebook script was coded by two of my very talented co-workers, and we’ll use it a lot for our future games and stuff.

My personal score is 52, which is pretty low compared to the comments on the blog post. Give it a try/slap.