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ISO

So, ISO comes from the International Standards Organizations that set standards for all sorts of different types of products out on the market, and that's where the ISO comes from. And before anyone wants to write me a letter, because I know people just love to write letters, and I get all these hand-cursive-written letters about how wrong I am about things. There is an argument that should be called ISO, and I call it ISO because that's what everyone I've known for my entire life has called it. But there is a little bit of argument that is pretty factual that you could call it ISO, but it just sounds a little bit weird to me, so I call it ISO. And if I say it fast enough, it sounds the same. Okay, in any case. ISO is the light sensitivity setting of the sensor. And for good or for bad, it's generally 100 as the base sensitivity of most of our sensors. You can crank it up to 200, and the sensor will now become twice as sensitive as it was at ISO 100. And this statement is incorrect. Th...

e sensor is not twice as sensitive, but it cranks up the brightness, and it makes it look like it's twice as sensitive. And the resulting photo means it's twice as bright. And what's actually happening is the sensors just taking it and working its little magic on it to make it brighter. All right. We can crank up the ISO to and it's not four times as sensitive as it was at 100. Eight is eight times, 16 is 16 times, and so forth. Now these numbers can vary because there are some cameras out in the market that have a base ISO, or what is also known as a native ISO of 200. In some cases, it's 80. In some cases, it's 64. And so you' gonna have to check your camera to see what its lowest number settings is, and that's the key, lowest number setting. So the ISO that is available on cameras today, recently, to stretch upwards a little bit, the lowest is and the highest is 3,280, on a brand new camera that was just introduced a couple weeks ago. All right. And so, if we want the optimum image quality, it's gonna be the lowest number on our camera, and then the higher sensitivity is usually top out well before three million. All right. So let's say you're at ISO 400, and you crank it up to ISO 800. What's changed? Well, you have essentially doubled the sensitivity of the sensor. You're making your image twice as bright If you go from 400 to 200, you're cutting the sensitivity in half. Once again, we use those words stop, we are changing it by a stop up or a stop down. Now what you will find, if you go in to change the ISO in your camera that many of your cameras, but not all of them, will allow you to change in 1/3 stop increments. So, between 1600 and 3200... Oops, I see these numbers are slightly... The arrows are slightly off here, folks. This is the first major mistake. Please write me a letter about this. So between 800 and 1600 is the stops of a thousand and 1,250. You'll typically find this on either medium to high end SLRs and mirrorless cameras that you'll be able to adjust these in thirds of a stop. Some of your cameras will give you an H1 settings or a High 1 settings, or possibly a Low or an L1 settings. And so what happens is your camera's native or natural sensitivity level is the lowest solid number. And as you double, double, double, double up at a certain point, it's gonna be probably say High 1. And what this means is it's one stop higher than the last number. Two is two stops higher. And so it's pretty simple. One stop higher, we go back to the previous one and we double it. It now goes up to 6400. Or, excuse me, 12800, and then up to 25,600. Low 1 in this scenario would be at 50. And so what's happening is that these are kind of warnings that the image quality is gonna be degraded because you're going to the extremes of what the sensor can handle. Now, the manufacturers are not real clear about what's going on. Why don't they just call this 12800. They should, in my opinion. But to the best of my understanding, what's actually happening is as we go from 100 to 200 to 400, something physical is changing in the sensor. They're pumping more electronics, they're rerouting something in order to crank up the signal. They're making a physical change to let information that is being gathered. When we go up to the other ones, it's more of a software change. They get just whatever result they're getting, and they crank it up in the software in the camera. And so it's a subtle difference between the two. You may not ever notice the difference. But most of the cameras are gonna have this high, and some of them will break this in third stops as well. If you see a .7 or a .3, it's just those third stops in there. So let's talk about Auto ISO. because this is one of the options on your cameras. You can set a particular number or you can say, "Forget it. "Just let the camera do it." Okay, so what happens when the camera is in control of the ISO? Well, it would prefer to be at the lowest setting, like ISO 100, in most situations. And what it's gonna do is it's gonna look really closely at your light meter, to see whether you have a lot of light or not very much light coming in your camera. And so, in a situation where it gets darker, less light, it's gonna crank up your ISO, so that you have an appropriate shutter speed for hand holding the camera. And as the sun gets brighter and brighter, it'll go back down to 100, and then it will just kinda stop right there. And that's the basics of how Auto ISO works. Now where it gets really interesting is whether you're controlling shutter speeds or you're letting the camera control shutter speeds. Because in some cases, people let the camera control the ISO, and they also let the camera control the shutter speed, and then some interesting things start to happen. Okay. And so, let's just say we're at ISO at 125th of a second, and now it gets brighter. Well, there's no place to go on ISO, so the shutter speed moves up to a faster shutter speed dial to accommodate for the extra brightness. And as it gets darker, the camera will work with the shutter speed down to a certain point, and then it stops. There is kind of a floor to the change that it makes, and this is the the minimum shutter speed that the camera wants to go to, because it knows below a certain number, you're likely to blur the camera from handholding. And you'll notice that I say handholding and not tripod use, because your camera has no idea whether you have the camera handheld or on a tripod. It's just assuming you are handheld. So once you get down here, what happens when it gets darker is that we're gonna have less light in the camera, and the camera starts cranking up the ISO to higher numbers. Now what's interesting is that you can adjust the minimum shutter speed that your camera will go to if your camera has a customized way of setting the minimum shutter speed when Auto ISO is used. And so this is something that you'll have to jump into your menu system to see if you have it. This is a fairly new features. It was not very common on cameras three years ago for instance. And so you can manually set this wherever you think you can handhold your camera, wherever you want it to go. And by cranking this down lower, that means your camera is gonna be going up to a higher ISO less often. Now, to take this a little bit further, this minimum shutter speed can be set to automatically adjust according to its needs. And its needs are gonna depend on the lens that you use. So for instance, this is a Nikon 24 to 12 lens. In a normal situation, you would want to have this at a 30th of a second if you were at 24. As you zoom up to a normal range around 50, you would want a minimum shutter speed of a 60th of a second. And if you zoomed up to the 120 range, you might want a shutter speed of 125th of a second. And if you recall, this goes back to one over the focal length rule. If you remember, we talked about that in shutter speeds. Well, the camera can automatically adjust the shutter speeds according to your needs. But wait. This is a stabilized lens, which I can hand hold at a slower shutter speed than the focal length. So what you can do now is you can go in and you can customize the Auto ISO on your camera to allow you to use a slower shutter speed if you want it to by one, two, or three stops, depending on what your camera will allow. So if you know your camera has three stops of stabilization, you could dial that in right here, and let your camera use a different shutter speed according to that. Or say if you were, you had a little bit of tremor in your hands, you're not able to hold the camera as stead as other people, you could say, "Let's set this a little bit faster." so that you'll always have a little bit faster shutter speed to accommodate for that little bit of shake. And this is one of the great ways of getting in and customizing some of the newest cameras. Now this is not on many of the cameras. This is on maybe 15 or 20% of the cameras that are currently out on the market, but we're gonna see more of this. And so if you do wanna let the camera take over, you can really kind of guide it into your exact needs. I know this section is a little bit complicated first time around. But once we get through the rest of the sections on shutter speeds and apertures, and setting the exposure, this will make a little bit more sense sometimes on the second time around. All right, let's take a look at a test image at different ISO settings to see what these differences about cranking the ISO up and how much noise are we going to get. So I took a modern full-frame camera, and I shot it at all of the ISOs from 50, all the way up to 25000. And you can see as we get up to 25000, we're getting a lot of noise, and it is gonna be especially clear in the dark areas, especially right here in the middle of the photograph of this little camera. And so, it's gonna look like gritty sandpaper. Now I have a general rule of thumb when it comes to the ISO. And that is figure out the range of ISO on your camera. And the top one that you can go to is garbage. And the second highest is also garbage. And the next one down is probably the highest one that you're gonna wanna go to if image quality is pretty important to you. And so I've had some people in my class that have had older cameras that only had a top ISO of 1600. ISO 1600 is garbage on that camera, so as ISO 800 on that theoretical camera. And that leaves the person topping out at around if image quality is important. The newer cameras are able to go up to higher ISOs because they have newer, better sensors, with better processing, better technology, and they're able to push the limits on it. So any number that you see, those top two numbers just cut them off and forget about them. They're probably terrible. And this varies a little bit from camera to camera. It's a rule of thumb, it's not perfect, but it's a good thing to think about as far as which ones do you not wanna go to. So let's look at some photos and talk about why we are choosing different ISO settings. So, for most of my photography, in a situation where I'm shooting a landscape, I'm gonna wanna choose ISO 100. I'm trying to choose 100 as much time as possible, because that's the best setting available in my camera. I can put my camera on a tripod, my subject is not moving. I can use any shutter speed. This could be a one minute exposure, this could be a thousandth of a second. It doesn't matter compositionally or subject-wise because nothing is moving in here. What if something is moving? Well, I'm thinking about shutter speeds. And even though I don't have them listed here on screen, as I'm shooting the picture, the shutter speed is foremost in my mind, because there is a subject moving in this photograph. And if I have a shutter speed which is acceptable for stopping their motion or have acceptable blur, if I can get away with that shot at ISO 100, I would prefer to be there. I don't wanna have to go up to a higher ISO because it's just gonna lower the quality of my image. What about in a low-light situation. That's usually when people start cranking up the ISO on the camera. Well, wait, before you start just cranking up that ISO, let's think for a moment. Is anything moving in the frame? Well, technically the moon is moving, but not really very much, okay? So basically, everything is stationary. Am I on a tripod? In this situation, I am, which means I can use pretty much any shutter speed. And so I'm gonna try to keep my camera at ISO 100 in this case as well. I go up to ISO when I come off the tripod in many cases. In this case, I was at a car show, and you can see the reflection of the car that I had to lean over in order to get this shot. I found out the wrong way that at custom car shows, they don't like you putting tripods on the hoods of the car, especially when they have metal feet in them. They don't like it. You gotta go handheld. And so, handheld shot, I'm a little bit... Movement now, all right. And so I need to compensate with a little bit of faster shutter speed. And as I've said, I'm not showing you the shutter speed, but that's what I'm thinking about, I need a little bit faster shutter speed to handhold that shot. In this case, I'm out on a dock. And you've probably been out on some of these docks that move around a little bit. And so I can't leave the shutter speed open for tool long, but I was able to get away with it at ISO 200. And so when you're changing ISO, you're really thinking about shutter speeds. What are my shutter speeds? In this case, I'm shooting action. I need a very fast shutter speed, at least 500th of a second, right? Fast human action. And so, if I'm shooting action in most every case like this, I'm gonna need ISO 400 or higher. I mean I would like to be able to shoot this at ISO 100, but they're just moving to fast, and I need too fast a shutter speed. Working under a low-light condition. Handheld, I might need a faster, a higher ISO, so that I can have a shutter speed that I can still hand hold the camera. Handholding the camera, another low-light situation, and I need to be careful about my movements and his movements. Because even though he's just sitting there, he's gonna move around a little bit, and I don't want him blurring, because he's a major point in this picture. And so I'm thinking about shutter speeds, what do I need? Here's something that's moving really quick. It's out in broad daylight, but I need a really fast shutter speed to stop that action, and I'm gonna give myself a little bit of a higher ISO so that I can select that faster shutter speed. Going up to ISO 1600. You can usually bet that I'm handheld in lower light situations. Now in this case I'm not handheld, I think I'm still on a tripod on this one, but the bird is moving so quickly, my shutter speed needs to be faster so that I can stop that motion and makes sure it's sharp. I don't go up to 32000 very often, but you're in a wine cellar and you're trying to photograph handheld without tripods, because you're trying to move quickly. Sometimes you need to go up there. Very low-light conditions. Handheld, a little bit of movement. I'm getting some blur here, but I actually wanted the blur. A little bit of blur was totally fine with me. And so I'm thinking shutter speeds, but I'm adjust ISOs. Very dark situation. ISO 64000. I hate going up to 6400. This is where you have to go in some cases if you wanna do star point photography, so that night time photography. No moon, this is just stars milky way galaxy. There's a blur over on the left-hand side. And sometimes you have to go beyond 64000. This is in a very, very dark bar, he had like one 60-watt bulb above his head, and that was the entire light for the band area in this particular bar. And if you look really closely. This thing is as noisy as can be. It's terrible. But I was using the fastest lens. I was holding the camera as stead as I could trying to shoot when he was moving as little as possible, but it was absolutely necessary to go up to that ISO. All right, outside at night, street lamps. Problem at 12800, you don't get a lot of nice smooth. In the fur, you're not gonna get a lot of detail, and that's what's gonna happen when you're shooting at these really high areas. Kinda this molten... It kinda becomes this blob of information here, not nearly as clear. ISO 25000. Well after sun had set, this is Yosemite National Park. Came across these guys driving back to camp. Now, you can take your original raw image, and you can apply some noise reduction to it, and you can fix this a little bit in post. And we'll talk more about this in the art of editing, where you can take an image, sharpen it a little bit. You can take away a little bit of that noise. And so it'd be better if could've got away with a lower noise, but I was using the fastest lens and the slowest shutter I could get away with. But that's just kinda the situations you kinda get forced into because it's so dark out there. But realize there is a little bit you can kinda back off on how bad it looks with som noise reduction software later on. All right, question for you. With what type of subject does ISO not matter? I'll let you just think about this for a moment. Is there anything that you could shoot where ISO does not matter? And the answer is none. ISO always matters on image quality. There's a slight caveat. If you print a picture small enough, people aren't gonna notice. So if you post your photo on Facebook, but you did just a little tiny one-inch photo, no one is gonna know if it was at ISO 100 or 1600 for the most part. But under most normal photographic situations, the ISO always matters because it comes down to your image quality and image sensitivity. And so, I shoot a wide variety of subjects in my photography, and I'm able to dive into my Lightroom catalog and figure out how often do I use one ISO over the other. And so you'll find that I shoot a lot of photos, almost 60%, at ISO 100, because I'm always trying for the right technique, which is having the lowest ISO possible. And I will use a higher ISO if necessary. Now if my job was doing band photography, I was going to the night clubs, photographing all the local bands in the dark night clubs around here, chances are there would be a gigantic spike over at eight, 16, 32, and 6400. So it really depends on the type of work that you do as to what this is gonna look like for you. But the idea is to try to keep the ISO as low as you can, because that will keep the quality as good as it possibly can be. So the ISOs that you're likely to deal with are usually in the 100 to 64000, and it really comes down to quality. Optimum image quality at the lower numbers, higher sensitivity at the higher numbers, and the guidelines is pretty simple. You wanna keep the ISO as low as possible, and the reasons that you're gonna change it is because you need to adust your shutter speed. You need a faster shutter speed, bump up your ISO, and you'll be able set a faster shutter speed and get the correct exposure. It's a slight penalty to pay, and sometimes it's worth it. So your next learning project is to do an ISO test on your own camera. Because two things are different between you and me. We have different opinions and we have different cameras probably. And so you wanna be able to test your own camera to know where your own limits of your camera are. I've already given you the guideline, which is your top two ISO settings are garbage. You wanna do that on test. You wanna see if I'm lying. You wanna see if I'm right, or we have the same standards or not. And so this is part of the little handout, the download in the class, a quick easy way to just shoot in your camera on a subject over different types of settings. And then we also have the video to accompany along with it, so you can see my results and you can kinda compare them to your own results.