Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV. I'm Mark Wallace in Darling
harbour Sydney Australia and we're going
to take on a challenge and that is which
one is the best thing to do in low-light
or in the dark? Should you use a really
low ISO value and a slow shutter speed
or should you crank up the ISO and use a
faster shutter speed? Which one is going
to give you the best image, the best
image quality? Well we know there's a
trade-off between those two things.
so ISO the higher it goes the more noise
you'll see in your image
but on the other side,
the shutter speed, the slower
it goes the more motion blur you'll see
in your image so we're going to show
motion or freeze motion
and how much noise is going to be reasonable?
What can we use there?
So what we're going to do
right now is we're going to shoot Sydney,
our Darling Harbour. Right behind me
there's the cityscape, there's some boats
down on the water. They're moving a
little bit. The water is moving a little
bit but pretty much nothing back there
is moving and because motion is really
the thing that we're worried about with
our shutter speed,
with a scene like this
we can start with a really, really slow
shutter so that's what we're going to do.
So I'm shooting with my Leica M10 here
and I have a 28mm lens. I've set it
at f/8 and we're going to first shoot an
image at ISO 100 so let me step over
here I'm going to look through my
viewfinder and this is telling me that
my exposure is 16 seconds
so I'm going to take a 16 second exposure
I've already focused this previously,
so this is going to go for 16 seconds
and what that means if there's anything
that's moving that's going to show up in this
image but the cool thing is water
usually looks better with the slow
shutter speed. It sort of smooths all
that stuff out and so when we look at
our final image, you can see that it
looks very pleasing and so in this
instant a low ISO and a slow shutter
speed wins but just to prove that,
what we're going to do
is we're going to reshoot this,
so what I'm going to do now is, I'm
going to change my ISO.
I'm going to change that from 100.
We're going to go all
the way up to ISO 3200,
that means my shutter speed is now a
half a second so I'll shoot that click
to half seconds and when we play this
back and look at it,
we can see, well the noise isn't too bad,
but notice the difference in the water,
the water looks much better
with that slow shutter speed
and if we really zoom in on the image
you can see that the noise in the high
ISO image just isn't really pleasing,
so with things that aren't moving at night
I would say shoot with a slow shutter speed
and a low ISO,
but what happens if you're trying to shoot something
that's moving? Maybe you're shooting
along the street or you're trying to
shoot something like cars or whatever
and you want to freeze that motion.
Well then that's a totally different story so
let's do that next.
We've seen what happens when everything is still
motionless ,we had our camera on a tripod,
the buildings weren't moving. The only
thing that was really moving in the last
picture was the water and the boats just
a little bit
but we were able to take our ISO
way down and use a long shutter
speed but now I'm on Calco Bay Wharf
there's people walking around, there's
this really cool nightlife,
I want to take a few pictures of the people
and the scenes here and I'm going to do that
without a tripod and without a flash and
that means if I do this with a low ISO,
my shutter speed is, it's going to be so
slow we're talking about a half second
a full second exposure then it's just
going to be a big blurry mess. So in this
situation I have to take my ISO way up,
so I'm going to put my ISO up to
ISO 6400 maybe even a little bit higher.
I'm shooting at a wide open aperture of f/2
with the 35mm lens and that way
now I can shoot handheld, walking around
without a tripod I can get away with
this type of photography, so this might
work if you're shooting a birthday party
or a wedding or any kind of event
where you can't have a tripod or a flash
and so let's do that right now we'll walk
through here and I'll show you my results.
Well the glory of high ISO is that you can
shoot handheld with scenes like this,
so I'm shooting an f/2 and I don't have
a tripod but I can still capture the scene
with the ferris wheel and all the boats
and everything and at at 6400
that is a 1/60 of second exposure
which is totally fine shooting a handheld
you know at the scene like this right here
I can shoot that because it's emitting
light with an ISO of around, I'm going to do
800 maybe a 1000 and we'll see how
that works. We don't need that much I'm
still at 90th of a second
and I can really just play with the scene back
here it's going to look really really cool.
So what did we learn?
Well we learned that if we're shooting
something that's not moving, like a building
or a mountain or maybe even the ocean
and the camera
is on a tripod,
we can use a very low ISO value
and then let that shutter just
hang for 20-30 seconds
or even a few minutes
but for shooting something
handheld or walking around in low-light
and we don't have a flash,
what we need to do is,
we need to open up our aperture
to let in a lot of light
and boost the ISO to something like 6400,
3200 or even higher than that.
So the question is how high can you
go with your ISO?
Well the good news is
that most newer cameras
handle high ISO values very well
so it's not like a really grainy noisy nastiness
that we used to get just a few years ago.
Now we can shoot at ISO 6400
or 12000, 800 and it's totally
acceptable but it really depends
on the camera and how old it is,
so do some experiments with your camera.
Take your camera.
Open up the aperture.
Take your ISO value and play with it.
Put it at 800.
Take some pictures.
Put it at 16, 32
and on up and see where it gets to be a little bit
too noisy and then you'll know
what that high ISO limit is for you
and your camera.
Well thank you so much for joining me
for this episode.
It was a ton of fun.
I love hanging out here in Sydney Australia.
I'll be in Australia for a few more
months, so make sure that you don't miss
a single episode. We’ve had a lot of cool
things planned here for Australia
and you can make sure you don't miss
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so click that subscribe button right now.
Also check me out on Instagram
you can see my trip through Australia
and around the world
and you can see how I put some of these practical tips
into everyday use.
I'm posting pictures every day,
so make sure you check that out as well.
Thanks again for joining me
and I will see you again next time.