ISO (Part I): What is it?

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Hi guys, sorry I haven’t posted in such a while. School started last week and it has been crazy compared to the holidays. I feel like I’ve been buried under a mound of homework and things are so busy! From now on, I will be posting weekly in the weekends when I have time.

This photo could have been much better if I had set the ISO to 100 instead of 1600...if you zoom in, you can see that there is a lot of noise in the photo.

This photo could have been much better if I had set the ISO to 100 instead of 1600…if you zoom in, you can see that there is a lot of noise in the photo.

Here, you can see some noise.

I have zoomed in for you and you can see the noise.

Anyway the other day, I went to the park with my family and of course, I took my camera with me. I was taking plenty of photos of my sister playing on the playground and then I realised…my ISO was on 1600 on this bright, sunny day. Major face palm. I was really stupid and had forgotten to check all the settings before taking those photos. As a result, my pictures were all grainy and quite unsatisfactory. This is the effect of ISO on the look of images.

ISO is the sensitivity of light in your digital camera (it also refers to film speed in analogue cameras but I will not go into that). Basically, it controls how much light the camera sensor will receive based on the setting you have selected. When taking a photo, we need to evaluate the light setting and choose an appropriate ISO setting for the photo. The smaller the number, the least sensitive the camera becomes to light. On my camera, the lowest ISO is 100 and the highest is 1600 although in other cameras, they can go much higher. When taking a photo on a bright, sunny day, I would use ISO 100 and if I were to take a photo in a darker setting such as at night, I would use something like ISO 1600 or 3200. However, the higher the ISO, the grainier/noisier your resulting image becomes.

Fact: ISO is the abbreviation for the International Organization of Standardization. This international group with headquarters in Europe works to provided standards for a variety of different measures. ISO is a universal measurement that enables digital photographers to make ISO choices just as film photographers choose their film speed.

Hopefully, I will be able to post next week. That is if I don’t have too much homework! For now, that is all.

-Xinxin Moon

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