The Intensity of Light: Higher and Lower Sensitivity

I finally understand what exactly the ISO settings do with my photography. It makes the camera more sensitive to light, there by letting you use a higher shutter speed or smaller aperture for those shots that require them in low light conditions. But it does have it limits, so here are my test shots taken inside at late evening to explain what I found:

 

ISO 200, 1/30 secs, f5.3

ISO 200, 1/15 secs, f5.3

ISO 200, 1/4 secs, f5.3

As you can see with these first shots is that to begin with they are too dark, even on a very slow exposure, and on the last photograph the little bit of movement in the wings is distorted as the exposure is too long to capture the wings perfectly.

 

ISO 320, 1/2 secs, f5.3

ISO 320, 1/10 sec, f5.3

ISO 320, 1/10 secs, f5.6

With a slightly higher ISO I am able to capture the light how it appeared to me, but at a cost of having a completely blurred picture. A shorter exposure time darkens the images but is still unable to capture the images clearly with the birds fast movements.

 

ISO 500, 1/5 secs, f5.3

ISO 500, 1/8 secs, f5

ISO 500, 1/8 secs, f5

At ISO 500 I can capture the right amount of light very well at an exposure setting that freezes the birds movement if the bird itself is still. Unfortunately with any movement the camera is still unable to freeze the bird enough, even though it is now 5x more sensitive to the light.

ISO 800, 1/13 secs, f.5.6

ISO 800, 1/15 secs, f5.6

ISO 800, 1/25 secs, f5.3

800 ISO is almost perfect for capturing my budgies jumping around, and the right amount of light so that the images appear with the same light intensity of real life. The only time it doesn’t capture everything is when the bird moved very quickly, But his little hops around his cage were caught fine.

For one last test I bumped the ISO right up to 1600 just for an extreme comparison:

This time everything was sharp and the lighting was perfect! But the trade of is this:

These two images are portions of my final image and cropped at 100%. As you can see in the beak there are grainy particles and the image is not smooth, and in the second image which is actually the shadows in the black parts of the feathers, there are no clear lines at all and it is very distorted.

So using a higher ISO can be very useful in making the camera more sensitive to light so that you can use the shutter speed and aperture settings that you want to achieve the look you are going for, but it leaves a lot to be said about the quality of the image which becomes grainy and unfocused in areas that might actually hold detail that you need to make the image work. On the flip side though, you may like this effect as it can create the feeling of an old photograph, or the image may be so busy in other areas that you wouldn’t notice the tiny flaws in quality. It will also depend on the size you are going to produce the image at, the larger the image the more noticeable it will be, just like increasing the size to 100%.