Hey, What's all that noise...?

When film was king, in our pre-digital world, photographer's fretted over their photos having too much grain. Too much grain, or a gritty look, could ruin that family portrait of Uncle Bill and Aunt Alice with their new grand baby.

Of course, not everyone felt this way regarding the gritty look. In fact, many photojournalists and street shooters intentionally shot with B&W, high ISO films and embraced the high contrast, gritty look, technique. They did this by pushing their film by underexposing and over developing it to achieve this effect.

Today's shooters, using digital cameras, now have to worry about too much noise in their shots rather than too much grain.

Noise is analogous to grain in film and can be as distracting and often look similar.

So...what is noise? While, technically speaking, there are many types of noise, it usually shows itself as speckles in an otherwise clear area of an image.
Further, there are ways to fix noise in post production.

However, here are some quick tips one can use before shooting to reduce the noise without using software and save time in processing your images:

The most common cause of noise are high ISO settings. Lower your ISO settings to reduce the noise signal on your camera's sensor. Luckily, most cameras today do pretty well regarding noise at high ISO's. Though generally shooting above ISO 1600 is problematic.

Another cause is heat and long exposure.
Keep your camera cool. Don't leave it where it will get hot, like in your car or in a bag exposed to the sun.

Anything that makes the camera's sensor continually work causes excess heat. Thus, causing more noise in your images. Such as, shooting in the burst mode, or long timed exposures, or shutter speeds.

Reduce noise by shooting to the right, huh?
By slightly overexposing your images your camera's histogram looks like a bell on the right side of the graph. Why do this? The fact is that correcting an under exposed image in post production (making it brighter) will bring out the noise in shadows. Thus, darkening an over exposed area is usually a better option for digital shooters in post production.

Hold down the noise and you'll be a better person. In addition, passer bys will smile and give you a friendly nod.