I went to " le musée de la Renaissance ", a castle to Ecouen in north of Paris. It displays some beautiful tapestries housed in very dark rooms. The curtains are always closed and the lights are extremely low . The flash is forbidden to protect the precious tapestries. Psyche’s gallery, for example, is amazing and perfect for testing out my new camera in low light . To get the shot, and to avoid a very low speed (1/15 s at f5,6), without the use of a tripod as it's not allowed, a starting point of 12800 ISO was tried. Unfortunately this wasn’t suitable. It was too noisy unless processed using the RAW files with DXO ( I have heard it's giving brilliant results at high ISO ) or lightroom 3 which is expected to be released very soon. The next test was at 6400 ISO. Still far too noisy although suitable for some customers but not stock agencies. The best results were from 3200 ISO and less as long as the pictures are not under exposed. These were processed using Lightroom 2.6 and I was pleased with it considering the lighting conditions. However, I was disappointed as I thought the new Canon would give me good results up to 12800 like the new Nikon D3S which is at least 1 ½ stops better.
