Raising the ISO #photography
Quite often there isn’t enough light and you don’t want to use your flash. The answer is to make the sensor on your camera more sensitive to light. This is easier with my DSLR than my bridge camera and it can help you take sharp shots indoors or when there are dark skies. I went to the art gallery this week to collect a picture that was in an exhibition and wanted a few shots of a tablet honouring Boer war participants. Raising the ISO on my camera to 400 did the job and I didn’t need to use a flash.
Wide open
I shot this from about 6 ft away, wide open at f/1.8 using my 35mm prime lens and so the shutter speed of 1/200 of a second gave me a sharp image. I then decided to change the lens and take another shot to get the text easier to read. This next shot is still at ISO 400 and again I shot wide open at f/5.6 on aperture priority and that gave me a shutter speed of 1/25 of a second. The lens was my 18 – 105 mm (max aperture f/4.5). The shot is sharp enough but I could have gone to ISO 800.
Raising the ISO
Raising the ISO will be more or less standard practice now we have dark skies and sometimes I’ll be raising the ISO and using the flash as well. The flash can be very bright in dark conditions and raising the ISO can mean a flash that is less intense.
