ISO and you

Paratroopers from the 301st TPC conducted nighttime Airborne Operations leaving from San Diego, California and landing on Edwards Air Force Base on January 21, 2011. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

   Believe it or not, there was a time when I disliked flash. "Why use flash? I'll just turn up my ISO!" "No one likes flash in their eyes," "It's more 'tactical' to use flash," "The flash seems to have a mind of its own," and a plethora of other excuses to not use flash.

   So, for those of you non-converted, what to do? I like ISO. No, I love ISO. [I love flash more...] Sensors get better every other month it seems and after playing with a NIKON D3s a couple years ago in pitch black conditions at 102,000 I was impressed. Yes, at 102,000 the noise is ridiculous, but that fact that I could shoot 1/60 at all and get something in those conditions blew my mind.

   But this wasn't shot with a D3S, it was shot with a t2i (an old canon entry level dslr) with an ISO1600 f/3.5 (not a very wide aperture) at 1/60th. You'll notice it's pretty noisy at 1600, but it gets the job done. It was sunset so I wanted to keep the oranges and I didn't have a gel with me to match the light of my flash with the light of the sunset.

   At least the higher ISO got the job done at dusk; good luck getting anything without a flash, tripod, or a much wider aperture after the sun goes down without cranking out your ISO way up. A tripod would have been nice to have, but even then I probably wouldn't have been able to capture this blur free even with a tripod, these soldiers where moving pretty quickly. A 1.8 lens would have been great to have here as well, which I did in fact have, but it wasn't the angle I wanted.

   My lens was as wide as it would go, and my shutter speed was as slow as I could hold it without blur. Which really left me with just one option, kick up the ISO.

   "If you love ISO much why is it your last option?"

  Because it saves the day. You can't always have the gear you want, but being able to quickly and easily make sacrifices in quality for improving your lighting is better than nothing. In the above case I wanted to use a wide angle lens, which only opened up to 3.5. I had a 50 mm lens that opened up to 1.8, but it wasn't the angle I wanted. I was able to keep the lens I wanted and still got the shot because I upped my ISO.

A few words about noise

   In the Halycon days of film increasing your ISO meant putting in a new roll of film and in exchange you got some fairly pleasing grain. Grain was a by product of the increased sensitivity. Nowadays uppping your ISO is as easy as a couple presses of a button, but the by product of increasing digital sensitivity is noise.

   It's like when you're listening to a low quality audio file and you turn your stereo to max volume; sure it's loud, but it's not very clear, that's noise. You're turning the volume on your camera with low quality light and the end result is a noisy photo. The colors are a little off sometimes, and you'll have a rouge pixels that are green, yellow, or red instead of blue.