While in New Zealand recently, I had the delightful experience of seeing a wild Kiwi on Stewart Island. It was foraging on the grass road verge under a street light right outside the accommodation cottage we were staying in, which was well inside the urban area of Oban. I saw it again in the same spot several nights later, foraging under the streetlight so apparently visits that spot regularly. By moving slowly and quietly, I didn't disturb the kiwi as it went about pulling up worms from the soggy ground. Torch light would almost certainly have disturbed it. So as an experiment in what might be possible without having high expectations, I tried photographing it using the street light solely for illumination. This required an ISO of 32,000 and hand held at 1/13 sec, f/5.6, 300mm focal length. While part of the bird was totally shadowed including the eye due to the near absence of any reflected light making these parts essentially unrecoverable, I was surprised how well the shot worked. There were lots of duds though at such a low shutter speed but the image stabilisation certainly worked - most duds were from subject movement.The crop covers about half of the frame area, which helps a lot. A tight crop would have been too much.

If I was being cheeky (which of course I would never be , I might point out that street lighting is not 'natural light'.

I am continually amazed by how much modern sensors, in conjunction with modern AI-based noise reduction software, are capable of. But, as you note, it is critical to get the exposure right in camera as there is virtually no capacity for shadow recovery once you get to extreme ISOs.

Simon

It's not all about noise reduction and SNR. Don't forget the other critical image quality factors of dynamic range and colour sensitivity which are also reduced at high ISO, and they are not so easily 'recovered'. The Canon R5 at ISO 32,000 has only a little over 6 Ev of dynamic range and only about 4-bits per colour channel of colour sensitivity. Even with the best noise reduction, the image quality is going to be on the edge of acceptable.

Fair point Simon. I have been very pleasantly surprised by the performance of the R5 sensor. Nevertheless, the shot was underexposed somewhat so it has perhaps held up even better than you suggested. I've lifted exposure on the RAW by a third of an EV and increased it a little more during subsequent steps. The problem with the shadows was the relatively narrow pool of light over the bird meaning the surrounding landscape was not contributing any significant reflected light. Even if I'd exposed correctly, the shadows would not have been saved. Also, I reduced noise with Neat Image which I understand is not AI based but instead uses some complicated mathematics that I don't understand to do its job. So it seems clever mathematics or AI can help here.

And thanks Ian - yes it is an image of limited appeal due to the quality issues, but still remarkable a photo is even possible in that situation (at least to me).