ISO and Sensitivity

How much light is too much? How much light do you need for a good shot? Light is the most important factor in photography. It can literally mean the difference in night and day. A cameras ability to let more or less light in and the way it can handle different lighting situations can make you a pro at the balancing of light if you can set the right ISO. Your cameras photo sensor is used to record the image and magnify or decrease the light sensitivity. When you increase the amount of ISO on your camera it increases the amount of light your sensor will try to maximize from the picture. This allows you to take a brighter picture in low light. The downfall of increasing ISO is the image can have increased noise. Noise in your picture can degrade the image quality and make it appear less sharp. 

The part you need to master is knowing how much light you need for most situations. You can learn this by taking more pictures in a slew of different lighting situations. It will always benefit your pictures to take them with an ample amount of light. However you will not always have perfect lighting and you will need to increase your ISO. You can use different modes on most DSLR’s to control ISO. All the automatic modes will automatically set the ISO; you will have to venture onto the “manual” portion of your cameras controls. That means you can use creative, manual, program, aperture priority, and shutter priority mode. Your camera may have others, and they may be listed differently so please refer to your manual if you cannot figure out which ones give you control the ISO. You can turn you camera to program mode for example and then set your ISO to a level you think is high enough for the lighting you currently have. A great thing about digital cameras is being able to immediately view your results. So you will know if you increased your ISO to much or if you didn’t increase it enough. If your picture is too dark you will need to increase your ISO, if too bright or too grainy you will need to lower your ISO. 

I had fun playing around with the different ISO settings on my camera. I went from the top to bottom of my cameras range and shot a multitude of different pictures. They varied from bright natural light to low level night scenes with no flash. Most of the pictures I took came out and were recognizable; however some did come out with a lower quality, mostly because of a higher ISO rating. My best advice is to get use to your camera and its limits. You can read lots of reviews online about how your camera will perform and act in different situations. Those reviews will mean nothing to you because they don’t know how that camera will work with you and what situations you will put it through. Do the right thing and get out and use that camera!