What is the Highest ISO you feel comfortable with?

[Henry Domke]

Dense clouds, gusts of high wind and intermittent rain made photography challenging on Sanibel yesterday.
I had to increase the ISO setting to 10,000 to get a fast enough shutter speed.

Question: What is the highest ISO you feel comfortable using?

Ring-billed Gull Flying
Canon 5D3
Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS II
ISO: 10,000
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/2000
Manual Exposure
Hand Held
AI-Servo AF with the center AF sensor selected
AF Area Selection Mode: AF Point Expansion (4 points)
AI-Servo Case 2 ("Versatile Multipurpose")


Raw file processed in Lightroom 4
A significant increase in contrast needed (+69)
I was surprised that there wasn't more noise. In Lightroom I only needed to apply a luminance noise setting of 20 and a color noise setting of 35.
I used Photoshop CS6 to replace the grey background with a bit of blue.

[arash_hazeghi]

noise and noise reduction is not a big issue when the bird is white and lacks plumage pattern. This one looks OK but again it's all white and there isn't much plumage details where noise/NR affects.

Here I would have opened the aperture instead of pushing the ISO this much.

[Alan Murphy]

Shooting images with no darks or mid tones, I can always push the ISO higher, as noise shows up first in darks. I try not to go over 1600.

[Henry Domke]

noise and noise reduction is not a big issue when the bird is white and lacks plumage pattern

Here is a photograph of an osprey that I took about the same time as the gull picture. It is much darker and has a lot of pattern in the plumage. All of the shooting information is the same, including that it is ISO 10,000.
When I zoomed in 4:1 I did see more color noise in the dark areas but the luminance noise was about the same. To fix the color noise I moved the color noise slider in Lightroom to 70.

How might this picture have been better at a lower ISO?

[Jack Breakfast]

I use a 7D and am delighted with its performance at iso800, and will take it up to 1600 if the image is on the lighter side of things...

[arash_hazeghi]

The osprey shot does show noise and the feather details have suffered from application of NR

Max ISO that is acceptable to me is 3200