A challenge accepted...

Wandering round Seafield Pond late this afternoon I noticed a swarm of midges buzzing over the reeds at the water's edge. Apart from feeling distinctly itchy myself, I recognised this as a definite photographic challenge. I manually focussed on the reeds and racked up my ISO to a 1000 and shot a sequence of shots just above the reeds. I was quite pleased to get two or three midges sharp in most of my images but then had to use powerful noise reduction software to smooth out the tones of a very noisy image. I use DxO Optics Pro which is a bit costly but does a brilliant job on noisy images as using it in Prime mode, it samples a thousand pixels round each point to determine how reduce the noise. It takes a bit of time too (maybe a coupe of minutes for each shot) but the results are well worth while and make using higher ISO with noisy cameras like my Panasonic Lumix RX330 worth the effort.