As suggests the title, this is a post about ISO and all that goes with it.
There is a greatly shared emotion of fear of High ISO amongst many photographers for some common reasons. Often, it is that we fear to end up with a very noisy picture, much grainier than we would like. And for situations such as portrait shooting, or indoor coverage of a corporate event in which you can not use Flash but you must absolutely produce high quality images. Fear not. You can set your camera to its maximum (or close to) ISO setting and capture those moments that you can not compromise. I did it, and literally impressed myself with the quality of my images.
Recently I was at a function as a guest and I had my DSLR with me (I no longer have a handy digicam :-( ) and needed to take nice shots of the speakers on stage and the performances. As I was a guest, I really did not want to attract much attention to myself with the "big" camera...and my 70-300mm lens sticking out above the head of the man sat infront of me. oops!
I had to lower the shutter speed down to 1/50 and even 1/40 and also had to stop down to F4.0 (increase the aperture). This was ok but it was still not enough. I was already at the near maximum ISO setting of the camera I was using that day (Canon 450D)- ISO800 plus the images were slightly blurry due to the slower shutter speed.
As I zoomed quite a lot (I was sat quite far from the stage), at such a low Shutter-Speed, camera-shake was inevitable...even though I was seated. So, I did the only sensible thing I could have done in such a situation. I threw my camera to the ground. ...But, seriously, I set the ISO to 1600. I then increased my shutter speed to a reasonable 1/80 and occasionally 1/100 in order to have sharp and non-blurry photos.
The pictures turned out far better than expected, and I did not even need to make any outrageous adjustments in Lightroom or Photoshop. Best of all, the noise on the pictures was hardly noticeable.
Here are some examples of the shots, all at High ISO. You'll notice, the noise is somewhat noticeable but nothing near "awful". I always like to use available light over flash, but being obliged to avoid flash, this was a great exercise.
So, do NOT be afraid or nervous to increase your ISO or even set it at its maximum when you have to or wish to avoid using Flash. Flash brightens pictures etc, but, occasionally pictures look best when taken using just the available lighting. I think so anyway :)
For those of you who are not too familiar with ISO and what it does, here's a very good and brief description provided by DPS : http://digital-photography-school.com/iso-settings
Emmanuel.
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