This week we are going to talk about ISO
we have another sort of technical episode
AdoramaTV presents
Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of
Exploring Photography right here on an AdoramaTV. It's brought you
by Adorama the best photography store in the world.
Check them out at Adorama.com. Well we have been
diving into the exposure triangle for the last few episodes. Last week we had
sort of a
technical episode about aperture values in this week we have another
sorta technical episode now we have already covered
the aperture and understanding how it opens and closes to let in more or less light
and shutter speeds how they go faster and slower to let in
more and less light and control our motion
blur and all the motion stuff this week wanna talk about
ISO, now this is going to be specifically about how ISO works
I just did a video about that not too long ago so if you don't know how ISO
works, make sure you check that video out it's got a really cool cartoon about light bulbs
and all kinda stuff. So
watch that first if you're not really a familiar with
ISO and the basic functionality. We're going to talk about in this
episode is Auto ISO and how that relates to the exposure triangle.
Now, in the past few episodes we've been talking about controlling our focus
using our aperture in controlling
motion using our shutter speeds, but sometimes
you have to sort of control both and your in this dilemma
of what should I do?. I want my aperture to be small enough to have enough depth
of field and I want
my shutter fast enough that I'm not getting motion blur from hand holding my
camera - but I just can't get there because
when I put my in camera lets say to f8, I can't get my shutter speed up high
enough
to overcome the motion blur, well what we need to do is increase our
ISO to make our camera a bit more sensitive to light
and to get that shutter speed a little bit higher, but sometimes you've got
shifting light and we are out shooting around
and we want our camera do that automatically. Well luckily for everyone
we have something called auto ISO, and it sort of
magic and what we can do is we can actually put our camera in manual mode
and we consider aperture to whatever aperture value we want for
dept of field and then we can go in and we can set our shutter
to whatever shutter speed that we want and then let our camera determine
the correct ISO now this isn't always going to work
so don't just go and say "Hey Mark, you said me I can do anything and it would work it"
It won't always work
if you have a really low light you're trying to shoot at f16 in a 1/2000th sec
that's not going to work. There is not enough light and more if your
shooting wide open it may be f1.4 at 30 seconds that's not gonna work
either so bear with me here. Plan work for everything but in most scenarios
Auto ISO is going to help you out with you being in the say
hey wanna shoot at an aperture value of maybe f5.6 with the shutter speed lets say of
200, in that scenario - it should work in
light sort of this and if the clouds go away with sort of a cloudy sky here today
these clouds go away and we get more light. Well our ISO is gonna take a dive in if
it gets kind of dark and we get storm clouds ISO will increase.
It's gonna give us a lot of freedom and there are some gotchas
when using Auto ISO and I need to explain all those.
With auto ISO let me go through how it works in different modes.
So if you're in aperture priority mode in other words you're sending your
cameras
aperture and you're sending your cameras ISO normally
and the camera is figuring out the shutter speed what happens is this -
You'll set your cameras aperture and then
the ISO is going to stay low as long as your shutter speed is high
and let's say the 1/400th, 1/800th of a second 1/200th second
but as soon as it starts to drop down into the 1/30th sec 1/15th of a second
area that ISO is going to start jumping
up. Now on some cameras what you can do is you can go into the menu settings
and you can tell your camera, hey an auto ISO,
I want the ISO to kick up anytime
the shutter speed hits lets say a 1/30th second or 1/60th of a second
you can tell your camera what the slower shutter speed
that you want to use is that's really nice cause it
gives you some insurance to protect you against camera shake
and the gotcha with that is sometimes your ISO is gonna shoot
way too high and your
gonna get noisy images. You don't want that. The other thing you can do with your
Auto ISO is you can't say I don't want the auto ISO to ever kick the ISO
over a certain level so you can set up these parameters. You can say
head kick in when my shutter speeds at 1/30 sec start going up
but don't ever go over ISO 800 or 1600
you can set some parameters and if the camera can figure things out - it will warn you
and say that's not working.
So in aperture priority mode you set the aperture,
the camera's always gonna try to keep the shutter to a nice level
by automatically increasing the ISO - that's awesome.
Now in shutter priority mode in other words you set the camera shutter speed
and the camera figures out the aperture,
I don't recommend using auto ISO and this is the reason why
what's going to happen is you're gonna set your camera's shutter speed say to
1/125th a second or 1/60 of a second and in low light
the cameras going to instantly open the aperture as wide as possible
every time if you're low-light, it's gonna open it up and it's gonna open it before it
starts to increase the
IS0, what that means is you're always going to have shallow dept of field and you may
not want that. So if you want have
some dept of field that's nice and sharp and a fast shutter speed
that is not going to work for you, what I do recommend
and the more I recommend using ISO in is full manual mode.
So you put your shutter to whatever you want it to be 1/60 sec or 1/125 sec.
Generally you're gonna be using lower slower shutter speeds
because if you have lots of light it will just keep your ISO set to a low value
and then you'll be setting your aperture to something like f5, f6 or f8
somewhere in that vicinity and then what the camera is going to do
is it's just going to be increasing the ISO to try to keep
those settings to work in the exposure
triangle, and that's awesome specifically since you can set the
upper limit and you can see never go over this certain
value and that's going to make sure everything stay safe
and if the camera can't do that well it's going to give you a little warning
in the viewfinder. Auto ISO is awesome I
recommend that you try in all three modes, aperture
priority mode, shutter priority mode and in full
manual mode and see how it works for your camera. The other thing that you really
need to do before using auto ISO
is to do some tests, you need to take your camera
set it on a tripod shoot something that is darker late at night
and do some tests ISO 100 200 400
800 1600 all the way up the scale and then look and see at what
value is your upper limit, is your camera not looking so good at ISO 800 or
1600
if so then when you're setting the upper limit of your Auto ISO
you know where to set that and so you should do that first and figure out what the
best
setting is for your camera. Now another caveat to this
is all cameras work a little bit differently some older cameras don't
have auto ISO,
some cameras the auto ISO works a little bit differently than how I described that
to you.
There are hundreds of cameras out there and so what you should do to make sure
you know exactly what your auto ISO is doing
is to read the manual. I know you hate it when I say that!. But do that,
read the manual to see exactly what your auto ISO is doing because
just because it works that way with my camera doesn't mean it works that way
with your camera
and Nikon and Canon and Sony and Fujifilm and all those different cameras
have a little bit different flavours of their auto ISO.
But there you have it auto ISO is a friend that will help you get great
pictures without having to do a lot of adjustments.
Well thank you so much for joining me in this episode of Exploring Photography.
Don't forget that Adorama TV is absolutely free, so click the link and
subscribe today and
also don't forget to check out the Adorama Learning Center
it's also free and has tonnes of information about ISO, auto ISO and manual
focus and manual mode in all those kind of things
and a link to the video I mentioned before all about ISO. So check that out.
Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you again next time.
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