Life, Love and Part 2: ISO speed

In a previous article I discussed how changing the shutter speed can greatly change the look and feel of an image. And once you tried a few of my suggested photos you immediately became entranced with my wisdom and I gained some street cred. But let me remind you, I’m a hobbyist at best and my amazing portfolio represents the few successes of literally thousands of failures, which sadly is a better track record than my dating life.

In this article we move on to a necessary counterpart to shutter speed: ISO speed. Remember how last time I asked you to compare the camera to an eyeball, with the shutters being the eyelids? Well this time you can still compare the camera to an eyeball but it will just get confusing when I talk about apertures. But what the heck, most things in life are confusing like feelings from gym class and swimsuits for fat people.

If the camera is an eye then the size of your pupil could be considered the ISO speed. Now let me explain why this is confusing, to be more exact the size of your pupil is more likely to be the aperture, or the size of the hole that lets the light through, but the sensitivity of your eye at different stages of pupil size makes more sense when analyzing ISO speed.

Think about the time you saw the matinee on a bright summer day. As soon as you left the theater you walked outside and everything was bright white and you screamed like a girl. This is ISO speed. At low speeds like 100 the film is not very sensitive to light. This is like being out at the pool at high noon with eyes wide open. When you were in the theater watching the movie your eyes were more like ISO at 800 or even 1600. When you were running from the cops through the moonlit forest at midnight because you failed to realize that no meant no your eyes were adjusted to the darkness and you could pretty much see the gist of your environment. This would be the equivalent of ISO speed at very high speeds like 1600 or even 3200.

Understand? Probably not, an easier way to understand it is just to know that ISO speed is how sensitive the film is to light. At lower speeds its less sensitive which means that it can capture an image just fine at noon day. At higher speeds it means it is very sensitive. This makes it possible to shoot better night shots.

ISO can do a few things for you. For one it can work to balance out your shutter speed. If you need to shoot something with a faster shutter around evening time you can set the ISO speed to be more sensitive (say 800 or 1600) making the shot brighter. Conversely you can set the ISO to 100 if you are going to leave the shutter open longer to mitigate light saturation.

For a while I used to shoot a lot of night shots at 1600. They were mostly of my neighbors and I didn’t want the flash to wake them or reflect of the bedroom window that separated us. The advantage was I could use a higher shutter speed in a dark environment and not have to worry about motion blur. Also flashes can drown out colors, reflect off surfaces and can make environments look very flat. The downside is that the end picture can be very grainy. Don’t get me wrong, you can still get some great pictures regardless of grain, but like garlic, use sparingly.

If you want a fun exercise go up on a hill that looks down on your home town at night. Set up your tripod and your camera and then set your shutter speed to about 3” or 5”. Now take a series of photos with varying ISO speeds. As the speeds increase you will begin to see a warm red glow engulf the city. This is another way you can affect the mood of your images.

When the ISO is lower your images fend off light giving it a colder paler look. At higher speeds the image tends to warm up, giving into oranges, yellows and reds. For instance if you take a picture of elderly people in swimsuits running through sprinklers in the summer months at mid day you’ll be tempted to shoot at a lower ISO to avoid saturation. Unfortunately someone will say “Good heck! Those poor old folk are running about in the winter!” This is due to what I mentioned before, most images at 100 ISO tend to have a cold stony feel to them. So now instead set the image to a high ISO, say 200 or even 400 and now set your shutter speed even higher. This will cause the image to have a warmer feel but the higher shutter speed control the amount of light coming through.

Let me give another example. If you’ve been a good study you’ve already gone out and played with your shutter speed but been horrified…HORRIFIED to find that often shadows are underexposed (too dark) and lit areas have been overexposed (too light). You’ve obviously been up late nights wondering how you can meet in the middle so that shadows aren’t too dark and lit areas aren’t all crazy white? The problem is this: When you focus your camera on your subject it adjusts to make sure the subject is lit enough (because even though you are playing with shutter speeds your camera will often still control things like ISO and aperture and adjust them accordingly. It’s like when you think you are using the big potty but you’re really using the little potty). So when the picture takes your subject is lit well but the shadows and sunlit areas are unintelligible because the camera didn’t care to take them into account. The answer my friend is ISO. If you’ve got shadows in the picture raise the ISO speed. If you’ve got pockets of light around lower your ISO.

You’ll run into countless opportunities to complain that your image is too dark or too light, if you’ve got a digital camera simply change the ISO and take the image again. If its still too extreme then give up, you’re clearly not a photographer. ISO is fairly intuitive and you’ll be able to quickly figure out how to make it complement shutter speeds. Apertures however are a different story.

You want to play it safe with a hybrid?

You want nice photos but are technologically retarded or afraid to go DSLR? Perhaps the Hybrid is a good bet. Hybrids let you control shutter speeds, ISO speeds and aperture size, in fact they’ll let you do most things a DSLR will. However it takes a little bit more time and isn’t quite as intuitive to play with the settings.

Often times Hybrids will have more functions than DSLR, like recording movies and shooting in B&W (which is silly because you can always convert your images to B&W via photo editing software, but you can’t switch B&W to color. Unless you’re magic. Are you magic? Cause if you are magic then go ahead and then make me better looking). If these functions are your fancy then and you want to take pretty good pics, Hybrids are the way to go.

What’s a hybrid? An electric car for anal retentive people that believe in such myths as global warming and cameras that aren’t compact but aren’t quite DSLR. I’m probably the only one who calls them hybrids. They’re camera’s that have lenses with words like 2x – 30x which means they can zoom pretty well, better than a compact usually. Often times the lenses can even be switched out for other lenses, although they try to make the main lens a sort of “one size fits all lens”. Their functionality tends to mimic compact cameras but also gives you greater control of settings for more professional users.

I don’t really know much about these cameras. In fact I don't even know what they're really called or honestly what market they serve. I do know that my sister-in-law has one and she likes it just fine. It takes good pictures and even video (which DSLR’s do not do to my knowledge). It’s a good fit for her because she wants better pictures but doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on the camera or the lenses. Also these cameras can be surprisingly affordable.

Know that if you decide to go the hybrid route the accessories aren’t that interchangeably like with DSLRs if you decide to upgrade. ..and a crazy lady just sat across from me on the public transit system…oh wait it’s a man that sounds like a girl. And now he’s looking out the window like an excited puppy dog. So I’ll end on that image, if only I had my camera.

You want the compact?

OK so you want to spend about $200 on a camera but you want a really nice one. Let me bring you back to reality. Really nice camera’s, like escorts, cost a lot more money. So you have to be willing to make some compromises. If you just want to take photos of family and friends and events, then stop stressing over it. Any name brand camera will meet your needs. However if occasionally you’d like to add a flare of art or control to your photos then I recommend looking for a few features on your camera.

Chances are if you’re reading this you really have no clue about things like shutter speed and apertures and ISO settings and quantum computing. So to begin, get a camera with these settings:

• Night
• Action
• Landscape
• Macro (means close up and in focus)
• Portrait

These settings are standard on most cameras and can make life much easier when you need to snap something in a hurry and want semi-descent quality. However if you really want to take some rockin’ photos then look for a camera that will let you control these functions:
• Shutter Speed
• Aperture Size
• ISO Speed

If your camera will let you control that, well then now you have a reason to read my blog. Know this, compact cameras, which are the bulk of the market don’t do really fancy things like take extreme close ups or 10 pictures a second, but they are just fine if you are a scrap booker or new mother to a child whose fathers may or may not be the man living with you.

If you’ve owned a camera in the past I recommend staying with the same brand. I had a friend who owned a Canon but then was given a Nikon, she soon became frustrated and set fire to an orphanage because it was too hard for her learn the Nikon menu. To make transitions easier, stay with the same manufacturer unless you really really really really want that specific camera.

Now what’s all this voodoo about megapixels? I’ll be frank; I recommend 8 megapixels or more no matter what. 6 is fine and even 5 will churn out a decent picture but if you want to enlarge a photo the more pixels the better. Of course note that the more megapixels there are the more space the pictures will take up on your memory card.

I was once in a camera shop discussing this exact topic. The lady who pretended (and probably did) know a lot told me “If you want to get anything published, the industry standard requires your photo to be 8 megapixels.” So just to be safe, if by chance you get that photo of big foot or the mayor conspiring with communists you want to make sure that you can publish it for millions.

I would also look at batteries. If you can get a camera that has a proprietary rechargeable batteries do it. Batteries are to digital cameras as film was to film cameras. LCD displays that show pictures before you take them and cameras that record movies can quickly drain the life out of a battery. I recommend buying two rechargeable packs, so that when one dies you have a back up on hand.

When you are finally to purchase purchase your camera, I’ll give you a couple pieces of advice. If you are ordering your compact online refurbs are OK. Check sites like Tigerdirect.com for great prices. Perhaps the most important thing I can tell you about online purchasing is to check the location of the company you’ll be ordering from. NEVER EVER EVER EVER PURCHASE CAMERAS ONLINE FROM COMPANIES BASED IN NEW JERSEY OR BROOKLYN. These are bait and switch companies that have low ethics. If you want to check reviews on websites you can go to bizrate.com and do a company search. Know that some reviews are bogus to try to fight the negative feedback they are getting for their lack of scruples…they are scrupless

You can read company reviews here. I highly recommend this more than I recommend penicillin after a really cool bachelor party in Vegas (because what's supposed to stay in vegas sometimes doesn't). This is Bizrate.com. It is mostly used to rate products but it also has a nifty database of alot of crappy experiences and dirty Brooklyn photo shops to give you the 411.

What camera do I get?

I’ve been asked it a lot: What kind of camera should I get? If I were to answer honestly you’d laugh in my face and ask “Where am I supposed to get $5000 for a camera?” at which point I’d storm out of the room muttering something about amateurs, opinions and an inaudible reference about sheep and your mom.

What type of camera should you get? It’s a function of how much you want to spend, how much you know or want to know about photography and what types of photos you want to take.

In most cases I’ll always recommend a digital camera. Although they may be more expensive than film you’d be an idiot not to realize the cost savings in the long run. However if you’re 90 years old going snorkeling for your first time I’d recommend a cheap underwater throwaway film camera. But the rest of the time the answer is simply “Go digital!” Plus I think if you do purchase or own a film camera the government considers you a social deviant and puts you on their watch list.

Now before you figure out how much you want to spend on your camera, let’s think about what you want to use your camera for? Do you want to just take mediocre pictures of how drunk Jim got at the party last night to post onto Facebook? If that’s the case then GET OFF MY SITE NOW AND FORGET WE EVEN MET! Really, if that’s the case then use your crappy phone camera and die because you’ve offended the art.

Think about your photos in the past? Are you mostly taking pictures to remember people and events? Or do you really enjoy taking photos and like to bring the creative beast that tricked you into thinking English or Communications was a valid major? If you are the former you’re budget should be $300 dollars and less and you should be perfectly happy with your standard digital camera, for the purpose of this article will just call it a compact camera. If you are the latter then one word…or four words depending, DSLR – Digital Single Lens Reflect Camera (I should stop and point out that yes you can get an SLR camera for around $300 but you will spend way more in film and processing in the long run, so don’t even muse on the thought). DSLR’s are much more versatile then other camera’s and are used mostly by amateurs wanting to go pro and pro’s. However if you don’t want to commit that kind of scratch to something you’re not sure about you can always go hybrid like the Canon Powershot S5 IS.

If you are casual go compact. If you really like photography, nothing less than a SLR will do. If you aren’t sure, maybe the hybrid is right for you.

To help you in your initial search here are a few articles by people who know much more about life, love and photography than me.

Here is a good article that breaks it down pretty good. The author owns a dog large enough for a small child to ride on and if that doesn't scream trust and professionalism I don't know what does. Plus he went to MIT which is ranked just below the Dixie College in IVY league schools.

Another article on selecting a camera by someone claiming they know what they're doing. Which is good because I don't even claim that and I'm still giving advice.

On last article by a guy who writes a lot of other photo articles and maybe paints wooden soldiers. This one is like a choose your own adventure in that the first part of it is short and too the point but then it gives you the choice to go to more links if you like. EXCITING!