From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Assessing your camera's high ISO capability

Assessing your camera's high ISO capability

From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Assessing your camera's high ISO capability

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As you should know by now, as you increase ISO, you also increase the amount of noise in your image. This means you can't just necessarily crank the ISO up until you get your shutter speed down to where you want it. If you do, you may end up with an unacceptable amount of ugly noise in your image. Fortunately, these days, most new cameras offer very good noise response. On my SLR, for example, I can go all the way up to ISO 400 with no perceptible increase in noise, and I regularly shoot all the way up to ISO 3200 without worrying about unacceptable noise in my final shots. Beyond that though, I find that my images simply get too grainy and noisy, so I only use ISOs higher than 3200 when I absolutely have no other choice, and I alter my expectations to assume that the images that I get will be compromised by noise. If all I am trying to do is document something then that's not a problem, but if I am going for a high-quality fine-art level of output, then I know that I will probably be…

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