Photography Tips | When and Why You Should Use High ISO
© 2013 Wazari Wazir | HaiQal and Raphael Playing WIth iPhone | ISO 2500 | 50mm | F/1.4 | 1/60
I believe that some of you who own a DSLR are afraid to use High ISO and some of you especially newbie, those who just started photography as a hobby fully dependent on Program Mode and rarely use Manual Mode when it comes to camera setting, some entry level DSLR which have build in pop up flash when you set the camera to Auto or Program Mode, they will automatically switch on the pop up flash when the camera sensor “think” that the lighting was not enough for normal photography and flash is needed.
I don’t want to discuss long about ISO because I’ve already wrote about it few times in my blog but what you need to know is that, the best ISO is always the lowest when it comes to photography such as ISO 50-200, but one thing that you need to know is that, the lowest ISO need more light in order to get your photograph properly well exposed. The ISO that you set on your camera will determine the sensitivity of your camera sensor to light, the highest ISO that you set, the more sensitive camera sensor to light but the setback is that, the Highest ISO will give you some “noise” a little bit grain to your picture like a super fine sand added to your photograph.
So, to keep it short and simple, when you need to use ISO is when the lighting is very low and you need to use higher shutter speed to prevent camera shakes such as taking a picture of a moving person. Landscape photographers who like to take a photograph of low light photography like during sunrise and sunset use Low ISO even though the lighting is low because they use long exposure and most of the time they are using a tripod, so it’s different. If we use longer exposure, like 1/30 or slower and we photograph of a person such as my little children above playing with an iPhone, when HaiQal move his fingers, it will get blurred and the iPhone will get blurred too because of the movement.
The other scenario when why we should use High ISO is when we don’t have a flash to light the scene even more, but there is another scenario when we do have a flash but why I think we should never use it. The reason is that, with flash, depending on the situation, the light from the flash will kill the mood, will kill the atmosphere, will interrupt the scene.
For an example, the photograph of my sons playing with the iPhone, the lighting that came from the device is not bright enough, common sense will say that I should use flash but I know it will kill the mood and interrupt them so when I look at my camera viewfinder and take a meter reading, I need to use ISO 2500 and set the aperture on my 50mm lens to f1/4. I choose to set the shutter at 1/60 because I want to minimise a camera shake, below than that I will get a blurry picture, so the first thing that I need to do is set the shutter speed, then open up the aperture and adjusting the ISO until I get the proper exposure.
The other tips here is to ask my son HaiQal to hold the iPhone a little bit closer to his face so more light will illuminated his face and Raphael. If you have similar device like iPhone or iPad, and whenever your children played wit it, try to take a photograph of them in your room, preferably switch off all the light in your room and let the light that comes from the device be the only light available and set your camera to Manual Mode and take a photograph.
The photograph of my sons above were not taken in a completely dark room, there is still available light but not bright enough, that’s why I need to use the 2500 ISO. The other situation that will brings good result when photographing using available light with ISO is when you wanted to photograph your kids with a birthday cakes, just let the light that comes from the candle illuminated your child face and you will definitely get a different mood compared to using flash to lit the scene.
