For those of you who aren’t photographer folk, I am going to teach you something today about a little thing called noise. Noise is what happens when you take a picture in low light and either in camera (by raising something called your ISO) or post processing, you make the exposure brighter. Enter noise. Little speckles everywhere on your image. They make your picture look fuzzy. And they take away from the quality. They are what I refer to ask my “worker bees”. This is how I explained it to James too when I was trying to teach him about camera settings. There are imaginary worker bees in your camera that you can send out to “get the light” for you. If you only send out a few worker bees to get some light for you (because there is enough ambient light), then you don’t notice them so much. For my studio shots with my lighting, my ISO is set to 100. So that means I’m sending out 100 worker bees to gather up some extra light for me. No biggie. . . 100 worker bees get hidden pretty well in my image. All of the images in this post though? They were shot most likely at ISO 5000 or above, and I think a couple of them at over 10,000. I don’t normally resort to this type of shooting, but in extreme low light situations (i.e. . . nighttime in our house, or a restaurant), and I don’t have a flash attached to my camera, I can bump up my ISO and send out LOTS of worker bees. The problem is–when you send out 5,000 or 10,000 workers bees, well. . . they start to show up in your image. Little worker bee specks. Hiding 100 isn’t a big deal, like I mentioned before. But throw 5,000 of them into your image and you’ve got a big mess. You can see what I mean most in two images in this post–the one of Carter in his turkey hat, and the other of him making muscles with Randy Santel. I could’ve avoided this by throwing a flash on my camera (or James too, since half of the images in this post were taken by him), but sometimes we are a little bit lazy. Or we just don’t have the flash with us. I’m glad we have the option of some help via my worker bees, but I am always a little disappointed with how much they show in the image.