THE MISSION
Understand the role ISO values play in the exposure triangle and how they affect image quality
Time needed One hour
Skill level Intermediate
Kit needed • Kit lens • Tripod
There are three main parameters that make up your camera’s exposure: aperture is the diaphragm of blades inside the lens that open or close to let in more or less light, then you have how long the shutter is open for, shutter speed, and lastly, you have ISO values.
ISO stands for International Standards Organisation, the company that standardized values of light sensitivity for rolls of camera film back in the day. In modern digital cameras, ISO has a similar function, but you don’t have to switch rolls of film to achieve different ISO speeds as digital cameras allow you to do all of this at the press of a button.
ISO determines how sensitive your camera’s digital sensor is to light. A low ISO value, such as 100 (the baseline on many Canon EOS cameras) is a low sensitivity setting, so will take lots of light to create a good exposure, but it does provide the ‘cleanest’ images and best quality. You can however crank up the ISO value to a much higher value, say ISO25,600. This will make it much easier to achieve a good exposure in very low-light environments, but at the cost of introducing digital noise, reminiscent of film grain, and some softening details. Think of ISO alike the gain control on an amplifier, it will boost the signal, but distortion increases as a result.
In this project, we’ll go through everything you need to know about ISO, and noise reduction, so when you’re out shooting next, you know exactly which ISO setting to use.
This story is from the November 2021 edition of PhotoPlus : The Canon Magazine.
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This story is from the November 2021 edition of PhotoPlus : The Canon Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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