ISO & aperture

[BeemerPhotography]

deleted

 

[prodigy2k7]

It depends what you want...ISO is used if you dont have enough light to exposure properly, or you dont have enough light to use a smaller aperture, or your shutter speed is too slow...

 

[mrodgers]

I would suggest putting your camera on a tripod, use aperture priority and setting the lowest, a medium, and a high aperture allowing the camera to choose the shutter, and shoot at each ISO so you could compare. Do it inside the house where you won't have a lot of light and some good shadows to look at the noise.

I shoot my bridge camera up to ISO400. 400 isn't ideal and there is a lot of noise, but I can get rid of it in Photoshop to my liking. I understand that I'm not going to get the greatest of image quality out of my camera, so I have to compromise my expectations with the limits of my camera. A little noise is fine, I mostly print 4x6 shots or reduce to 800x533 for the web.

Any dSLR I would expect to have much better noise control than my (similar to the one you mention) camera. I see photos all the time posted here with someone mentioning or complaining about the noise and I look at it pondering where the noise is. I wouldn't expect any dSLR to be as noisy at ISO 1600 as mine is at 400, so I would expect to be perfectly happy with any 1600 shot from a dSLR.

 

[FlyingFly]

DSLR's sensor is much bigger than Fujifilm Finepix S8000fd or similar consuming digital cameras. With same total pixels, the bigger the sensor area is, the more space one pixel takes up, thus the higher the Signal-to-Noise Ratio it achieves. DSLR could produce less noisy image comparing with a consuming digital camera at same ISO.

Most DSLR gets fine image quality at ISO up to 400. Some DSLR such as my Nikon D70's lowest ISO setting is 200.

 

[LWW]

Max aperture, at a given ISO, should give you the least blur because it will require the highest shutter speed that gets a proper exposure.

If you are using max aperture and still getting blur you need to do at least 1 of the following:

- Practice your hand held skills. I didn't learn in a day, but I have attained 200MM focal length shots of acceptable clarity at 1/15 of a second. Not every time, but it CAN be done.

- Bump the ISO to get a faster shutter speed.

- Use a monopod ... which I prefer.

- Use a tripod.

LWW

 

[FlyingFly]

DSLR's high ISO is much better than consuming DCs.

Following photo was taken at the Bund, Shanghai this September. It was at night and the only illumination is from the lamps along the street. I set my D70 to ISO800 to raise shutter speed because I didn't bring a tripod. The noise is quite accetable.

Nikon D70 + Nikkor AI35 f/2 at 1/13s, F2, ISO800. The Bund at Shanghai.

Following is another photo taken at ISO400 by D70:
Nikon D70 + Nikkor AF-S 28-70 f/2.8 at 1/5s, F4, ISO400. Inside Jinmao Building, Shanghai.

Both have low noise.