Noise Is For Heroes!

Is this familiar: You let the camera's Auto-setting do the work, and when you look at your pictures they're all snapped with what appears to be a six-figure ISO. You can barely work out what is what in the picture, or even if you actually shot something or didn't just forget to remove the cap. The curse of digital noise in small cameras has struck again.

Well, this is a perfect moment to be positive in order to be more creative. (BePoToBeMoC. Yes, I do like abbreviations. Thanks for asking!) So what to do with digital noise?

The easiest way to make digital noise look good is to convert your picture to grayscale. On some cameras you can chose to do this directly in the camera. I do this occasionally in the iPhone, but seldom in other cameras. I prefer to do the conversion manually in the development phase. This is because sometimes the pics actually looks good in color, and I want to continue working with that instead of converting it to b/w.

More is less

You may be tempted to try and hide the noise. There are lots of software out there for noise removal, with different results. None of them, as far as I know are capable of removing noise from a picture consisting more or less of noise. So, if you can't remove it or hide it, what to do?

Exaggerate! Just as C. Auguste Dupin realizes in The Purloined Letter. The best way to hide something is out in plain view. If you make the digital noise the hero of your picture no one will ever question the ludicrously amounts of it.

Take this picture, for example. The thing i like in the picture are the oniony (no, that is not a real word) light bulbs. But a can not really make the picture interesting as it is. So, I shoot with one of my trusted DUCs, and suddenly I get loads of noise as well as some jpeg artifacts to work with. I then pull at all the levers in Aperture, and voila! I get the picture at the top of this post, a nice result with good graphic qualities.

The reason I shoot black and white with the iPhone? There I use the nice app Old Camera, that also gives me random effects, tinting etc. Check it out. We will get back to software systems in future posts, if you got any favorite software that gives an instant DUC-feel, please share in the comments.

Oh, you don't get the title of this post? It is from an old song by the Damned, about the benefits of cheap digital cameras, called Noise Noise Noise.