If you're serious about photography, I recommend experimenting with your ISO settings (the sensitivety setting) to see what you can get away with. The setting which is right in one situation may not be right in another.
If you're getting shutter speeds so low that all your pictures are shaken, it's worth it to set a high setting, even though you're getting slight noise.
And conversely, it's stupid to use a very high setting if you're walking around on a sunny day with a wideangle lens.
Of course it ties in with experimentation (and study) about what shutter speeds you can get away with, and how different aperture settings affect your image quality on what lenses (many lenses are less sharp on full opening).
The Nikon D90 has excellent performance at high ISO, so I've decided (so far) to have a standard setting of 800, and auto-correction up to 3200 (if the shutter speed falls under 1/30 sec). On models older than the D90 I'd recommend 400 and 1600 instead.
I may set it lower than 800 if I need short depth of field in good light, or if peak sharpness is essential.
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Yeah, I like how I can change film as often as I like. I used to go for 200ASA for lower grain and good day light shooting, but as soon as you hit shade you were heading to trouble. On days I knew I'd shoot a lot I'd start the day at 100ASA, and in the late afternoon switch to 400asa.
I never got to the point where I carried two bodies for speed, but having the B&W or IR in one, and the colour in the other just slowed me down.
My last couple of film years Kodak had a low grain 800ISO which they were pushing as the way to go for point and shoots. I had good results with that, giving all the lattitude I needed, and better low light performance.
Still now I'm digital all round and can change effective film type/speed very quickly, and for B&W the common filters (green, yellow, orange, red) are built in digitally.
Last night I was cranking up film speed mode just to get more "grain" into the pictures. Maybe I should borrow DW's new laptop as that has Adobe Photosomething on it, and I'm sure grainy is an option.
I didn't find a good grain simulator yet. (Not that I've looked very hard.)
In the mid nineties I tried a fast film (800? 1000?). It was fun. But MAN, was it grainy. Big grains even on 4x6 inch prints.
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