Lowcountry Noise

I posted this is the birds forum hoping to get some help, but to no avail. So, I thought that my next best bet was in here.

I shot these yesterday about an hour and a half before sunset. Out of about 350 pictures, I think I may have kept 15. There were some that were out of focus, but for some reason a majority of them were pretty noisy. Everything was shot at ISO 500 and most on Av mode with my new 40d. I was generally ok when I shot ISO 400 with my old XTi (i know, different ISOs), but I'm now lost. I'm sure that a lot of it has to do with me not knowing how to work my new camera, but one question that I have always had is how to properly expose the image. Everyone says expose to the right and I try and do that, but when I do, I usually get an overexposed image. All in all, I had a lot of noisy images with an ISO of 500 and most of the histograms were in the middle or on the left side. Any help would be appreciated. Here are a few shots from today. Some ok, most bad. Hardly any PP done. Mostly just cropping.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

Try bumping up the ISO. Also look to get a faster shutter speed. They look slightly underexposed. You need some more light and possibly faster shutter speed. Expose to the right a little more. Push it a little more until blown-put highlights become a real issue. Your 40D can handle ISO 800-1600 no problem.

I thought I would just say that, the +1/3 and +2/3 ISO speeds are not "real" ISO speeds like 100/200/400/800/1600 and that they are made by pushing up or bringing down ISO 100/200 etc. (Someone else can explain it better than me) Anyway, Iso 500 actually has about the same amount of noise as ISO 800. The ISO speeds 1/3 above a native ISO speed are also more noisy than those 2/3 above a native speed. For example ISO 640 is less noisy than ISO 500 and only slightly more noisy than ISO 400. There was a thread about this a while ago with a useful link looking into this. Maybe I'll find it or someone else may beat me to it.

:edit: Here you go, I've found it, It's quite interesting and probably worth knowing. According to this, ISO 640 is a lot less noisy than iso 500 and only slightly more noisy than iso 400.

http://forums.canonpho​togroup.com/showthread​.php?p=5225

The order for lowest to highest noise is as follows for the 40D.

ISO 160
ISO 100
ISO 200
ISO 320
ISO 125
ISO 250
ISO 400
ISO 640
ISO 500
ISO 800
ISO 1000
ISO 1250
ISO 1600
ISO 3200

I played with one of your pic's I hope you don't mind I'm just trying to learn better PP techniques.

Naturalworldphotograph​er wrote in post #5981742
I thought I would just say that, the +1/3 and +2/3 ISO speeds are not "real" ISO speeds like 100/200/400/800/1600 and that they are made by pushing up or bringing down ISO 100/200 etc. (Someone else can explain it better than me) Anyway, Iso 500 actually has about the same amount of noise as ISO 800. The ISO speeds 1/3 above a native ISO speed are also more noisy than those 2/3 above a native speed. For example ISO 640 is less noisy than ISO 500 and only slightly more noisy than ISO 400. There was a thread about this a while ago with a useful link looking into this. Maybe I'll find it or someone else may beat me to it.

:edit: Here you go, I've found it, It's quite interesting and probably worth knowing. According to this, ISO 640 is a lot less noisy than iso 500 and only slightly more noisy than iso 400.

http://forums.canonpho​togroup.com/showthread​.php?p=5225

The order for lowest to highest noise is as follows for the 40D.

ISO 160
ISO 100
ISO 200
ISO 320
ISO 125
ISO 250
ISO 400
ISO 640
ISO 500
ISO 800
ISO 1000
ISO 1250
ISO 1600
ISO 3200

This I did not know.
That's actually pretty cool.

birds against the sky have to be shot to delberately overexpose the scene, try using EC up at +1 and see if it helps. Otherwise the cam meters for making the sky exposed and the bird is dark.

Richard, please see here on exposing to the right. It will open your eyes

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=66836

Naturalworldphotograph​er wrote in post #5981742
I thought I would just say that, the +1/3 and +2/3 ISO speeds are not "real" ISO speeds like 100/200/400/800/1600 and that they are made by pushing up or bringing down ISO 100/200 etc. (Someone else can explain it better than me) Anyway, Iso 500 actually has about the same amount of noise as ISO 800. The ISO speeds 1/3 above a native ISO speed are also more noisy than those 2/3 above a native speed. For example ISO 640 is less noisy than ISO 500 and only slightly more noisy than ISO 400. There was a thread about this a while ago with a useful link looking into this. Maybe I'll find it or someone else may beat me to it.

:edit: Here you go, I've found it, It's quite interesting and probably worth knowing. According to this, ISO 640 is a lot less noisy than iso 500 and only slightly more noisy than iso 400.

http://forums.canonpho​togroup.com/showthread​.php?p=5225

The order for lowest to highest noise is as follows for the 40D.

ISO 160
ISO 100
ISO 200
ISO 320
ISO 125
ISO 250
ISO 400
ISO 640
ISO 500
ISO 800
ISO 1000
ISO 1250
ISO 1600
ISO 3200

That's interesting to see that ISO 160 has less noise than ISO 100. Why is that?