Twilight Criterium: Take 2

Every year Athens holds a bike race in the downtown area.  Last year I covered it for the Red & Black (see here), but this year after I finished with Gymnastics I went over for some pleasure shooting.

I wanted to try some things with my camera that I hadn’t tried before so I thought about some research I had done earlier in the day about pixel density and low light shooting.  The gist of it was, the Nikon D3 can achieve really high ISO’s without a ridiculous amount of noise because the full frame sensor only has to produce something like 12 megapixels (max ISO is 25,600).  Comparatively, Canon’s full frame 1Ds is about 24 megapixels but can only achieve a maximum ISO of 3200.

Long story short, the bigger the pixels on the sensor, the better they are at handling low light.  That in mind I amped my camera up to 6400 ISO and the image size down to 5.3 megapixels (more than enough for anything I’d be doing with these photos.  So, how did my camera perform at high ISO and half its designed megapixels?  Like a champ.