I’ve always found nighttime photography with its deep shadows and bright hightlights challenging. With it is portability and low noise capability, my hope was to achieve some compelling D7000 nighttime photography. The camera is indeed enabling me to do just that, much as the D700 before it, with the premium of its weight and heft, was allowing me. Not only does the D7000 provide terrific shadow recovery, but it does so while retaining vibrant color. Add a proper denoise tool in PP to minimize whatever noise does pop up when we push shadows, and some striking images become your payoff.

Around the Pike Dock and skyline Paker’s and Queen Mary

Noise in clear blue skies can sometimes become an issue for landscape photography. Push and pull saturation just a little and noise becomes more apparent. Use a circular polarizer to darken blue skies, and noise may also come through more strongly. Avoiding under-exposure is key to keeping noise in blue skies to a minimum, as is keeping ISO as close to base value as possible.

The Nikon D700 has been to date the best camera I’ve owned for minimizing noise in blue skies. To see how the D7000 compares at its base ISO settings, I shot the next set of shots. You can click on each image’s thumbnail for a full resolution version, or you can click on the upper-left blue sky crops to see a swatch that has been normalized to the same equivalent resolution (at 12MP in this case) for an apples-to-apples comparison.

All shots were captured at identical or equivalent exposure settings and white balanced. Different lenses were used (35mm f1.8 for the D7000 vs. 50mm f1.4 for the D700), but in my experience, these lenses are fairly close in color rendering, and small differences can be offset through white balance adjustments.

D7000 @ ISO 200	D7000 @ ISO 200, upper left crop
D7000 @ ISO 100	D7000 @ ISO 100, upper left crop
D700 @ ISO200	D700 @ ISO200, upper left crop

Why should we worry about noise in blue skies? It turns out that if you perform Black and White conversions with a heavy emphasis on the red channel to get a dark rendering of a deep blue sky, noise can really come through, as these samples show.

D7000 @ ISO 200, B&W	D7000 @ ISO 200, B&W, upper left crop
D7000 @ ISO 100, B&W	D7000 @ ISO , B&Wupper left crop
D700 @ ISO200, B&W	D700 @ ISO200, B&W, upper left crop

Overall, it seems the D7000 at base ISO and at ISO 200 compares quite well with the D700 when it comes to minimizing blue sky noise. In the end, for color photos, as prints they do not exhibit noise as much as we can perceive on a computer screen. For B&W images, a little more care is required.