Noisy photo or blurry photo?

So I have been going through some pictures that I took while on holiday back in Zimbabwe and it lead me to consider the question posed in the title.  Be warned there is going to be some boring technical speak below, if people have questions I will do my best to answer them - still getting the hang of articulating my thoughts in crystal clear form. 

Let me back up for a second and set the scene so you are on the same page.  While on holiday I went with my folks out to Kuimba Shiri, a bird park on the shores of Lake Chivero outside of Harare.  Kuimba Shiri is a bird park that takes in orphaned or injured birds and gives them a second shot at a good life, it is an amazing place and definitely well worth a visit if you are at a loose end in town.

Every day at 4pm the birds are flown and this is a great way to witness natural behavior from a variety of different raptors up close.  Naturally I figured this would be a get time to get some pictures that are usually require a lot of graft to obtain.  Side note: I shoot with a Canon 600D (Rebel T3i) and on that day I had the EF-S 55-250mm kit lens on the body.  

Initially I was taking portraits of the birds in their enclosures, this allowed me to get some real up close shots and some great detail of the birds.  Now the thing is this area was in pretty deep shade at this late stage of the afternoon and shooting in Aperture Priority I knew I was going to have to up my ISO so as to avoid blurry shots. The obvious trade off though is that on a crop sensor, like the 600D has, at higher ISO I ran the risk of introducing digital noise into the pictures.

Here are a couple of portraits of a few of the eagles:

Martial Eagle - f/5.6; 1/400sec; ISO 400 at 250mm

Peregrine Falcon - f/5.6; 1/80sec; ISO 400 at 250mm

Now both of these pictures show a decent amount of digital noise - check out the right hand side of the Martial Eagle shot, there is loads of grain there or what is more specifically known as digital noise.  Now for the most you want toe be avoiding digital noise as the grain usually doesn't look that flattering on photographs.  I say usually because in some instances you may want that noise in there to add some artistic element.

Let me show you a couple of pictures I then got of some of the birds in flight.  

African Harrier Hawk - f/5.6; 1/4000sec; ISO 800 at 79mm

African Fish Eagle - f/5.6; 1/4000sec; ISO 800 at 250mm

So as you can see from the details below both of these shots have been taken at an ISO double of those of the portrait's I have shown above, why on earth would I have cranked it up even further??  Well the birds were going to be moving between really bright sunlight and some deep shadow thrown by a tree and I knew I would need as fast a shutter speed as possible in order to freeze the action.  I was shooting in aperture priority so that was no worry, camera sorts that out, put it to the lowest so the lens is as wide open as possible and now go for broke.

Once again the high ISO has introduced some digital noise to these pictures.  The key thing for me here is am I willing to put up with that for these pictures?  The short answer - most definitely!!  In order to freeze the action and get the pictures I needed I had to compromise by bumping up the ISO value.  This is influenced by the fact that my lens could only stop down to f/5.6 and not get super wide (f/2.8) like some of the pro lenses you can buy.  Coupled with the small sensor on my 600D then noise was always going to be a factor but I do not regret that for a second.

I only had one shot at getting these pictures so I had to make sure I nailed it. I am not going to be back in Zimbabwe for a couple of years and more to the point I will not witness that exact bird display ever again.... no one will. In light of that it was an absolute no-brainer - suffer some noise to get the in focus shot, noise is a minor detail when you come away with pictures you are really happy with and I am stoked with these! 

I hope this was not too boring a post.  I guess what I am trying to say is when you have the opportunity to see something like this make sure you do everything you can to capture it.  For me it was about making sure I came away with some pictures that will remind me of that afternoon out by the lake watching some marvelous creatures exhibiting their natural behavior; I truly believe I achieved that goal.

If you would like to see a couple more along with some other pictures of some birds from Southern Africa have a quick flip through these.

Thanks for taking the time, I hope it made sense, if not I hope you enjoyed the pictures :)