Photography Tutorial · 2019-10-27
ISO 3200 with Such Good Quality? Shooting in Low Light with Time Blending
Thomas Chu Photo
Those who know my work know this photo well. Shot at ISO 3200 and two stops underexposed, it won first place in the city category of this year's National Geographic photography contest.
But because it was shot at high ISO, I had to denoise heavily in post — enlarged, the photo still loses a lot of texture and detail.
So for posting on Weibo and for printing, I produced another version.
This version time-blends a high-ISO candid capture of the person with a low-ISO long exposure of the background — yielding exquisite image quality.
Time blending is a technique I often use for night-time humanistic photography. Today I'll demonstrate it with the photos below.
