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Photography Tips: ISO (part 3 of 4)

Photography is all about capturing light. Light bounces off objects, passes through the lens of your camera, and hits the film or image sensor, creating an image. The aperture controls how much light gets through the lens. The shutter controls how long the sensor is exposed to light, and The ISO controls how sensitive to light your image sensor is. In the old days of film, different kinds of film had different sensitivities to light. Some film needed almost no light at all, it was very sensitive, but it gave you rough, coarse, grainy images, while other kinds of film gave beautiful, clear, smooth results, but needed a lot of light to get anything. In digital photography, ISO controls the gain, or how sensitive the little CCD or CMOS chip inside your camera is to light. A higher ISO makes your sensor more sensitive to light, but it also picks up more noise, while a lower ISO value is less sensitive to light, but their is less noise. Electronics aren’t perfect, there is a little noise in the system. When you have a lot of light, the noise is easily overpowered, but when you have very little light, the gain ‘turns up’ making the image brighter, along with the noise. When you have a lot of light, you dont need to amplify the signal much to have it come through clearly. But when light is scarce, you need to amplify the signal. Turning up the ISO is like cranking up this volume knob on a really quiet song. Now the signal is louder, but so is the background noise. If you are …

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