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.

Life, Love and Part 1: Shutter Speed

I’m a hobbyist at best. If you look at my portfolio you might be inclined to argue and I’ll flatter myself by agreeing with you but the fact remains, I’m a hobbyist at best. I have won a contest or two with my work and I’ve had several people ask me to take family photos or teach them how I do it but I promise you, to get to my skill level isn’t all that difficult. To begin with, it’s a numbers game. More like shooting a target with a shotgun, if you pack enough buckshot and point it in the right direction you’ll eventually get something into the bulls-eye. Likewise for every 100 shots you take at least one has got to turn out and the rest will quietly be removed from memory like the time you kissed your cousin. Something no one ever has to know about.

But it’s more than just safety in numbers. If you take a thousand shots letting your camera decide your settings you’ll simply get average photos. We don’t want average photos, what we want to do is improve our odds, mitigating the suck factor. This is where a little understanding comes in. Working with your camera should be a romance, clumsy and full of abuse at first but eventually you become familiar with all the buttons that get them going just the way you want them to at the right time.

Obviously it’s important to understand the fundamentals. Sure you can read about the basics of photography, the rule of thirds, looking at the background, framing the subject, blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong, those are all important in positioning the camera right, but you also need to understand how to capture the light and movement best (shutter), change the depth of field (aperture), and use warm and cold colors (ISO). For the purpose of this article I will only talk about the Shutter.

For any beginner I believe the Shutter is the best starting point. To begin think of the camera as an eyeball, in this analogy your shutter is your eye lids. Every time you blink you are opening and closing the shutter. Now understand that instead of this eyeball processing several images it only processes one image per opening of the shutter. This means that the longer your eyelids are open the more light is landing on your film. The more light that that lands on your film, the brighter the image becomes. If too much light gets on the film then you will only see white, if too little gets on the film images become too dark to see or even black. So is the shutter on your camera.

At first it doesn’t sound that exciting; you may be thinking “Whoopee, I can make my pictures brighter and darker with this.” True, but you’d be surprised how much an image changes by restricting how much light can get through. Don’t believe me? Try this exercise. Take your camera out to photograph a sub-average sunset. Now take your camera and set the shutter to about 1/1000 to 1/2500 and start taking photos. If you’ve got a digital camera you’ll instantly be surprised. You’ll see that your camera is capturing brighter colors because the light doesn’t have as long a window to get in there and dilute the image.

Two pics taken at the same time with different shutter speeds (the one on the left was taken with a faster shutter speed).

Want something even better? Go to the beach a couple hours before sunset, have someone walk between you and the ocean and snap the picture with a shutter of 1/4000 of a second with the sun directly in the photo. What will happen is your friends and family will suddenly think you are Mozart or are wasting your life in accounting when you could be shooting for National Geographic. But you and I both know better.

So tricking the light is really cool. But there is another side effect of playing with the shutter: movement. This can either be really annoying or really cool. For instance if you are taking a night picture you will want your shutter to be open longer to let more light in, however when you take the picture you’ll notice that everything is blurry. The problem is when you hit the button on the camera you jerk it slightly so the entire image continues to record itself slightly off center. This is where tripods and timers (letting the camera count down before taking a photo, this reduces camera movement that happens when your finger pushes the picture button) come in handy. But it isn’t all bad. You know those photos of rivers and waterfalls and fountains where it looks like white cotton candy is flowing or the images of the stars rotating in perfect circles? These can be achieved by lowering the shutter speed to settings such as 1/25, 1/10, 1” (1” is one second for those of you wondering) and so on.

Slower shutter speeds can also be great if you want to show action in a photograph. Like a racecar careening off the track at 160 mph or an eagle attacking an orphan. When there is an element of blur in the image it tends to convey a better story than the crisp images that are achieved with higher shutter speeds. But again, you’re the artist and I’m sure if you get a picture of an eagle attacking an orphan people will be impressed regardless of whether there’s an element of blur involved or if it’s completely still or if that one guy that manages to get his head in all your pictures is standing off in the distance.

Now if you are really smart you’ve already caught the catch 22. You’re thinking if I slow the shutter down then won’t more light get in? And if I slow it down to 1” won’t my image be completely white? Depends.

First you’ll need to adjust for the time of day. Slower shutter speeds are better for darker spaces. However if you really want to get that cotton candy effect of the rapids (which is way cool) then slower is better. It is possible to shoot 1” and even slower shutter speeds at mid-day. You just have to make sure you’re adjusting the aperture size and the ISO sensitivity to compensate for the amount of light. The bad news is that is just a little beyond the scope of this article. The good news is that most cameras now days are pretty smart. They’ll realize that by leaving your shutter open for one second they’ll also need to shrink the aperture size and lower the ISO speed.

Practice with the shutter speed to begin with and soon you’ll find you have a pretty good feel for it and some pretty cool photos. I recommend getting a digital camera because you get immediate results and can quickly remedy an improper setting and even experiment to learn some new tricks.

The faster the shutter the higher the bottom number, the higher the bottom number, the less light will get imprinted onto your image. At extremes this can lead to some incredibly artistic representations of otherwise mundane scenarios.

The slower the shutter the lower the number, the lower the number the more light gets onto your image. This is advantageous if you are shooting in an area with limited light. But remember that it will record more movement as well. Not entirely a bad thing, as it too can be used to reinvent a landscape or show a story. Just remember that when you are shooting at lower speeds you will probably need a tripod and should probably use the timer on the camera.

One last bit of advice; if you’re using a telescopic lens you should know that they are incredibly sensitive to movement. Faster shutter speeds are recommended, if light is low however, you should use either a monopod or a tripod. Otherwise all your pictures will be very blurry and your heart will be very sad.