I went on a wildlife shoot today at the lower Washougal River in Camas, Washington, looking for critters but at the same time practicing good techniques, experimenting a bit, exercising my Canon 1D Mk III with birds in flight, and all the while hand-holding my 1D/100-400 IS combo, which is pretty heavy in my not-so-steady hands.

So, to compensate for my camera shake, along with IS, I needed a high ISO speed, so I set the camera to ISO 1600, which the 1D handles well *as long as you have a good exposure*. If you underexpose or have to do a lot of enhancing of shadows, the noise will show. To try to ensure a good exposure, I used Manual exposure, and then tried to apply the suggestion to "expose to the right", meaning in a given scene, especially if you're using a high ISO, and you're shooting in RAW, you can up the exposure to get more light and then bring the levels down in software.

The key is to push exposure levels up, but not to the place where highlights are absolutely blown. This means taking a test shot, then carefully looking at your image/histogram, making an adjustment and shooting. The final result is that your image will initially be too bright but with RAW software can easilly be toned down with no danger of ugly noise being amplified.

My situation was complicated by the fact that the weather conditions rapidly changed from sunny to cloudy to hailing then back to sunny again, so there were times when "expose to the right" resulted in "way overblown images" or "way too dark images" when darker light caught me off-guard.

The thing of note is that the dark images at ISO 1600 looked ugly when I tried to brighten them up, but when things were exposed to the right, over-bright images turned out great!

RAW software has great noise reduction, and I use that when I need to, but the highlight recovery that is possible in RAW is tremendous -- I'd be afraid to try this shooting jpeg!

Here are some examples!