Which ISO are you

As anyone who as been on Facebook knows, there are an endless amount of "Which_ _ _ _ are you..." You fill out an application and you become a generation, quotation mark, tool, movie... the list goes on beyond the imagination.

So my question is which ISO do you use? This is obviously rhetorical, but think for a minute about your approach to a scene. Do you think about your ISO setting as well as your aperture and shutter speed? If you don't, you should. Not only is it one of the three controllable components of making images, it may make the difference between "getting the shot" or not.

I recently photographed a High School musical, performed in their theater, with very low lighting. I had to use a 70-300mm lens to photograph from the back of the theater, so my fastest aperture was f/5.6,leaving me with no option but to photograph at ISO 3200. Will there be noise (grain) in the images, of course. But it also made for 185 images that I could post online for the cast/crew and parents to view and enjoy.

Don't hesitate to practice using the range of ISO settings that your camera offers. Photography is usually a system of trade-offs anyway, so crank up that ISO and get that shot. And if you don't delete the image and adjust it again.

From The Sound Of Music

From The Sound Of Music

Cheers

Mark