The HUGE Advantage of high ISO's

I don't have any pictures to show you for this post because I am in TX for a wedding this weekend and did not bring my card reader, but here's what I learned last night:

We had a nice dinner for the families and wedding party at Brio Tuscan Grille. They had put us in a great private room that was dimly lit. The walls were painted dark as well as the ceilings. Immediately, I knew it would be hard to take good pictures even though I had brought an SB800 flash. Why? Let me explain...

If you read this blog often, you know how much I hate using direct on-camera flash. With most photographers, that is considered to be very unflattering light and your pictures end up looking totally flat. However, you can usually bounce your flash off the corner of the wall and ceiling and get much nicer, diffused light even with the flash attached to your camera. The problem is this... light takes on the color of what it hits. So when you have a big white wall, everything is great, but when your wall and ceiling are dark brown (like the restaurant last night), you're in trouble because the light become dark brown!

I did have my 50mm f/1.4 lens with me last night, so I immediately switched from the 18-200 to it, knowing that I would need to be shooting at 1.4 the entire time, I just didn't know if even that would be fast enough. So I put the camera in Aperture Priority, dialed down to 1.4 and took a picture... too slow of a shutter speed. Dialed the ISO from 200 to 400 and took another picture... too slow of a shutter speed. Nervously, I dialed the ISO to 800 and took another picture... too slow a shutter speed.

Now, on my D50 (I just couldn't make myself bring the D3 on this trip), as with most DSLR's, you don't want to use an ISO above 400, but if you have to, go to 800. But that was not fast enough for me last night and I had to take pictures the rest of the night at ISO 1600 which I know will have plenty of noise in them once I'm able to look at them on the computer.

The D3 is such an incredible camera, and is awesome at shooting with high ISO's without any noise, and if I would have had it last night, I could have dialed in an ISO of 2000 without even thinking about it and snapped great shots all night. Instead, I was frustrated with my situation and really didn't even feel like shooting (good thing I am a groomsmen for this weeding and not the photographer!).

I'm not sure what the point to this entry is... I guess I'm telling you to go out and buy a D3 for $5000... or you could get the new D700 with the same chip for $3000