#3 ISO

Let’s look at the top dial of your camera.  I realize the top of my Canon Rebel camera might be different from yours, but the icons are usually similar.  Here you see many settings you might have used on a point and shoot camera.  Starting far right and moving clockwise around the dial we see the automatic settings:  mine has Video; Night portraits with flash; Food or close-ups with a blurred background and extra color emphasis; Sports or fast moving objects with the ability to take many rapid photos; Flower or close-ups (what we call Macro Photography); Landscape/scenery; Portraits where it blurs the background; CA is Creative Auto for portraits where you want to blur the background and smooth the person’s skin; Flash off photos where the camera would like to use the flash, but you don’t want it; and the last automatic setting is Fully Automatic - it shows an “A +” on my camera dial. This just turns the 35mm camera into a point and shoot.  It does all the thinking for you.

Today's blog is to encourage you to turn the dial one more notch beyond Automatic (A+) to the “Programmable Automatic” - a “P” on my camera dial.  Here the camera will still decide the shutter speed and aperture of the camera, but you can change other aspects of the camera.  I wrote about shutter speed and aperture in the second “How Do I Take Photos Like That?” blog.  Now, I will focus on what you can change in Programmable Automatic, starting with ISO.

ISO stands for “International Organization for Standardization”.  It’s how sensitive to light your photo is.  When I was a young man learning photography from my father there were no digital cameras.  My father used a 35mm camera and had to buy different film if he wanted a different ISO.  He would buy 100 or 200 ISO film if he was going to be outside with lots of light.  100 or 200 ISO film would make sharp images with good color outside.  If he wanted to take indoor photos or photos at a darker time of day he would usually get 400 ISO film.  It was more sensitive and allowed him to use faster shutter speeds and still get plenty of light in the photos.  So the darker times required a higher or more sensitive ISO.

So in “Programmable Automatic”, you can decide what ISO you want to use.  My digital camera goes from 100 to 6400 ISO.  If I have lots of sunlight, I might want a 100 ISO to get excellent color and detail in a shot.  Or the automatic ISO might make a part of my photo too dark for my liking.  So I can change the ISO to my liking and see if the photo looks better to me.  Additionally, a higher ISO lets the auto settings of the camera take a photo more quickly.  That way you can catch any slight movement without getting a blurred photo.  I suggest you play around with the ISO.  Notice how the same photo becomes lighter and more washed out as you raise the ISO too high.  A high ISO might be just what you want for indoor or night sky photos.  However, one sacrifice of a higher ISO is that the photos become more grainy.  A high ISO is what I have to use for astronomical photography, but I have to balance the image sharpness with how much grainy look I am willing to allow.

Look at my bee photo from a week ago when I talked about shutter speed and aperture.  I used ISO 100 since it was a sunny day.  I was still able to use a fast shutter speed of 1/640 sec to catch the bee in mid flight but got great color and details.  You can use a lower ISO for a bright, outdoor photo.  I did like freezing the bee but showing its wings were fluttering, so the blurred wings were just what I wanted.  If I had wanted to freeze the wings in the photo, I would have needed to use a faster shutter speed.

The photo above on this post is Davinci's "La Pieta" in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. I could not use flash photography in the Basilica, so I had to use a lens with a wide aperture and used a high ISO. This photo was taken with my 50mm prime lens with aperture f/1.8 and using ISO 800. This let me hand hold the lens to take a photo with shutter speed of 1/60 and not get a blurred photo. Due to activists destroying priceless art around the world, there was plexiglass in front of "La Pieta". Thankfully, with these settings and no flash, I was able to capture an image of such a beautiful sculpture!

The great thing about digital photography is you can always change the settings to see if you like the photo better.  Play with photos changing the ISO.  Try a dimly lit room to see how much detail shows up with a high ISO.  You pay for the high ISO with grainy photos.  But it does enable more than just outdoor photos, especially at events where they don’t allow flash photography!  

Keep finding the beauty in the world!