Tag Archives: RRHOF

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ISO 100

On this weeks episode of Shutter Tripping I talked about wasting  a whole morning of shots by shooting at the wrong ISO simply because I didn’t recheck my settings. It became the topic of this weeks Foul Up From the Field segment. I almost deleted them, but decided to go ahead and process them in Photomatix for fun. I wanted to compare it to last image set I took at ISO 3200, to the same image shot at ISO 100 (eventually I did realize what I was doing!)

I really thought that the ISO 3200 shots would be useless, but in fact they end up quite usable. No noise reduction was applied to the photo, and they were both pretty heavily processed in Lightroom and Nik Color Efex Pro 4. Older cameras would have made a horrible picture but new modern sensors show a different story. You don’t need to shoot everything at ISO 100 to have a good photo.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ISO 3200

Now admittedly the 2nd picture is noisier. If you look at the sky or inside the building you can see evidence of noise. However this could have been dealt with easily using noise reduction software. For shooting at such an aggressively high ISO level, it’s really quite good.

Now some of you are asking WHY would you do this. Well if you are on a tripod and you can get all of your exposures that you need you may not need to. However what about hand-holding in bad light or indoors? What about those times where it’s so dark your over exposure takes more time than your camera will stay open for without bulb mode (on a Nikon that s a 30 second exposure). You might be able to speed things up by changing your aperture, but then you sacrifice your depth of field. By raising the ISO you can decrease the shutter speed and keep the same aperture without being killed by high noise levels.

Keep in mind this was daylight and the sun was getting stronger. The same shot at night at high ISO would have been noisier. I’m not sure if it would have been to noisy or not, but I’d still rather some noise than no photo.