As I've been playing with lighting and exposure with the Nikon D80, I noticed something disturbing. When looking at a photo at full 100% resolution, I saw large amounts of noise. No clean lines, no sharp edges, no solid dark colors.
This bothered me. I triple-checked my ISO setting (100) and was still seeing it. Then I happened to look at my EXIF information. My photos were being shot at ISO 1600! GAH!
Turns out that while I was specifying my ISO setting, the camera had a setting deep in the menus for Auto ISO. And it was ON.
Once I turned that punk off, suddenly my exposures were much more interesting. And my images were MUCH cleaner.
At the top of this page I posted a comparison of 3 images. Each is more or less exposed the same, and zoomed in and cropped on the pen's nib. As you can see the ISO 1600 exposure is WAY noisier than the ISO 200 exposure.
Now I need to go back and start over learning my exposures. I thought I was at ISO 100 all this time, and experienced enough trouble to be very frustrating. My calculations weren't matching the resulting images. Time to go back to the Strobist Lighting 101 class and work through the exercises again.
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