RCP Photography School: ISO

Hello to all who’ve joined me on day 9 of this 26 day challenge to learn about the basics of photography.

If you’re doing this course, you probably already know a little bit about me but if you don’t, please check out who I am.

Today is a bit snowy and there is so much beauty around your garden, streets, local parks. I love photographing in the snow as it can be used as a reflector onto the flowers, trees and other outdoor scenes.

But there is a setting on your camera that can determine the amount of light that you allow into your camera. The more natural or studio/artificial lighting that you have, the smaller this setting needs to be.

Today I’m going to talk about...

I for ISO

ISO is one of the elements to exposure, which we have already touched upon. I had previously talked about this in the lesson on exposure.

ISO defines the lighting and the quality of the photograph.

For example, if you have an ISO of 100, with the perfect shutter speed and aperture, then the image will be perfectly exposed - by perfectly exposed, I mean there will be no grain in the image, because you have used the right amount of light around you but also within the camera.

However, if you have an ISO of 12,800, grain/noise will be present in the photograph - this would be seen when taking photographs in low light, where the ISO is trying to compensate for the lack of light coming through to the camera.

Get your camera and head out into the snow...

Put your camera into manual mode and keep your settings around f/2.5 and 1/250 (depending on what time of the day you take these photographs at, you may need to adjust them).

There are several ISO settings, depending on the camera that you have. Most cameras go up to ISO 25,600, but generally you will stay around 800 unless you plan on doing night skies!

Here are visual examples of what each of these look like (and in the snow as well - I did have a four-legged helper so maybe you can bring yours along too!) The higher the ISO goes, the grainer the right hand corner gets...