Noise at St. John’s Wood Station

In London today the sun set at 16:36. Between then and dusk at 17:15 there is still enough natural light for the human eye to see features in the scene and do most activities.

Compared to the human eye, though, cameras have a much more compressed range of being able to detect all the gradations from dark to light.

I shot this at 16:59 – a quarter of an hour before dusk.

You have two choices if you want to photograph in this low light – increase the ISO or keep the camera at base ISO and put it on a tripod.

I shot this at ISO 6400 and f3.2 and 1/200th of a second. If I had put the camera on a tripod I would have had to use a slow shutter speed. At base ISO I would have had to shoot at a quarter of a second and the person coming out of the station would have been a blur.

So what are the downsides of ISO 6400 in poor light?

The photo is very noisy. Look at the close-up of the face of the man sitting outside the cafe in the shadows.

So you might think noise is a terrible thing. But at a normal viewing distance I would see the photo differently. It is only when I get close that I see the noise.

Of course if I were to print it and stare at it at the same distance as I am from the computer screen then I would see the noise.

But if the print was in a frame and hung on a wall, the normal viewing distance might be more than a couple of metres, and then I would hardly see the noise.

Cézanne’s painting ‘Lac d’Annecy’ in the Courtauld Gallery in London is made up of big daubs of paint. But step back twenty feet or more and the scene acquires depth and you are looking across a lake. You can see it with this little version if back across the room and look at it.

The Shop Outside the Station

The shop is called HelterSkelter because this tube station is just a few hundred yards from Abbey Road and Abbey Road Studios.

Helter Skelter is the name of the Beatles song written by Paul McCartney that was released on the White Album in 1968.

In case there is any doubt that the name is connected to the Beatles, the faces of the Fab Four are peeking out of the side of the window, and the cover of the Abbey Road album is on the lower panel of the door.