What is ISO?

ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) is a number you can change on your camera which adjusts how sensitive your camera sensor is to light.

How does changing ISO affect images?

A lower ISO value means there is less sensitivity to light, so you will need more light to take a good photo, whereas a higher ISO value increases sensitivity to light meaning less light is needed for a photo. However, if ISO is set too high, visual noise can start being introduced into the image which is a grainy effect that if unintentional can lower the quality and effectiveness of your photo.

Despite this drawback, higher ISO values are still useful for taking photos where there are low levels of light. If you have ideal lighting conditions, your ISO number should be kept low to avoid introducing visual noise into your photographs. Unlike aperture and shutter speed, ISO is adjusted by pressing the ISO button and then selecting your desired number.

My ISO photos:

For my photoshoot, I took pictures of the same subjects while adjusting the shutter speed and ISO numbers to explore how they affect images.

Below are two images of a scrunched up paper ball, both taken at the same shutter speed but with different ISO numbers.

The first photo is significantly darker than the second because the ISO number is extremely low, which has reduced light sensitivity and caused a darker image. The second photo is much brighter due to a higher ISO number which has increased light sensitivity, as well as beginning to introduce visual noise into the image.

When taking photos, you need to adjust shutter speed, aperture and ISO all together to ensure the lighting is optimal for the effect you are trying to achieve. Fast shutter speeds which let in less light alongside low ISO levels to decrease light sensitivity can cause extremely dark photos, such as the one below.

If you over-adjust one aspect while not adjusting another, you can fix the lighting problem but introduce other issues into your photos. For example, in the image below, the shutter speed is still fast (1/100 sec) but the ISO has increased drastically to 6400, which has improved the lighting significantly but also introduced visual noise which has affect the quality of the image.

However, with the right amount of adjustment for each aspect (aperture, shutter speed and ISO), you can achieve your desired lighting without harming the image too much in other ways such as visual noise.

Conclusion:

Aperture, shutter speed and ISO all affect the brightness of your image so it is important to adjust each one to make sure your photos are your desired brightness whilst minimising other consequences like visual noise. For example, if you use a low ISO number, you might want to compensate by using a slower shutter speed and larger aperture to achieve optimal lighting.

ISO Definition

ISO is the number that represents how sensitive your camera is to light. A lower ISO value means there is less sensitivity to light and more light needed when taking a photo. On the other hand, a higher ISO means there is more sensitivity and less light needed to take a photo.​ This can affect the visual noise of an image, meaning the graininess of a photograph. High ISO is often used in low light situations, especially when a fast shutter speed or a narrow lens aperture is essential to achieving a creative goal.

My ISO Experiments

The purpose of this shoot is to look at capturing movement using shutter speed and different settings on the camera.

Francesca Woodman

Woodman was an American artist born in 1958 and started taking photos at age 13. Later in life she was well known for her black and white images which many were self portraits where she utilises shutter speed to make the images appear ghostly by obscuring the face and parts of the body. She grew up surrounded by art her father George was a painter and her mother a sculptor. Her brother Charles Woodman grew up to be an electronic artist. Unfortunately, Woodman suffered with mental health conditions and committed suicide at age 22

In this shoot we did took the photos with the same agenda however we wanted to capture movement within the style of Francesca Woodman.

Raw Images:

Shutter speed is the amount of time that your camera is letting light in for. The longer that the shutter speed is open for the brighter that the image will be.

If the object or person you are photographing is moving, for example sport photography, you will need to use a high shutter speed, to be able to capture the moving object clearly. Whereas if you use a low shutter speed such as 1/30 the colours of your image will be richer and more light will have been allowed in.

Examples of high shutter speed images

you can tell these images have a high shutter speed as they are moving images but the movement looks still.

Examples of low shutter speed images

and these images are low shutter speed as it has a bit of motion blur on the image.

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman is an example of a photographer who uses slow shutter speed. Many of Woodman’s images were taken in her parents farmhouse in the countryside of Florence Italy. The European art and culture of surrealist art, many photographers such as Man Ray and Claude Cahun have also influenced her work as you can their themes and styles in Woodman’s work.

In the topic of photography Woodman’s importance as an innovator really helped develop photography as during the 1970’s photography was still considered to be less important than painting or sculptures. Francesca Woodman helped pave the way for photography to explore more important themes such as identity, just like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin.

Image by Francesca Woodman

My Images

Contact sheet ( slow shutter speed )

Best Images Edited

these photos are good examples of a slow shutter speed as you get a clear sense of the motion blur that is occurring, which you can tell as part of the images are blurry as there is movement happening in the image.

I have made these images monochrome as I think you are able to see the motion blur better as well as making the images more dramatic.

Harold Edgerton

Harold Edgerton is a great example of fast shutter speed photography. Edgerton was born in Nebraska in 1903. The flash that Edgerton had used to create his most famous image of the bullet through the apple, was 1/100,000 of a second.

Many of his images have been featured in magazines such as “Life Magazines”, and when taking his multi-flash this strobe light could flash up to 120 times in a second. In 1934 Edgerton was appointed a professor of electrical engineering at MIT.

Harold Edgerton / MIT / 1964

My Images

contact sheet ( fast shutter speed)

Best Images Edited

these are some of my best images for fast shutter speed as you cant see any movement in the images. I particularly like the one of the yellow ball as the colour of the ball really compliments with the the colour of the tree. As well as the different tones that are on the ball from the shadows.

ISO

ISO is one of three main pillars of the photography triangle along with shutter speed and aperture. ISO refers to the light sensitivity of the camera, so the higher the ISO the higher the light sensitivity, So if you were shooting on a dark cloudy day you would want to use ISO 1600 or higher. The lower the ISO the less grainy / “noisy” the image will be, however sometimes grain on images is sometimes used for artistic design or dramatic effect. You want your ISO to be as low as possible whilst still freezing the action.

If you’re using a high ISO, in turn there is a possibility that the quality of your image can degrade.

Examples

Here are some examples of high and low ISO from my own images

These images have ISO that ranges from ISO 100 to ISO 3200

ISO is the number that refers to the sensitivity of the sensor – the higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor, but, along with a higher sensitivity, there is also a reduce in quality, or an increase in grain. Grain is the sandy effect over an image that is synonymous with film photography – it can be used artistically though, it creates a vintage effect and paired with some good editing can add a certain emotion to an image. ISO ranges from a very low 50, to a standard (highest quality) 100, all the way to the most sensitive (on the majority of cameras) being around 6400. With the invention of digital photography, ISO is now something you can change on the camera – it used to be that the roll of film you chose had a set ISO (this is because the film is the equivalent of the modern the sensor.)

As you can see, the first image is 100 ISO, the second image is 800, and the final image is 6400 – and with each bump in ISO the amount of grain increases, indirectly proportional to the quality. The amount of light doesn’t change in these because I adjusted the shutter speed for each ISO change.

ISO is the number that shows how sensitive the camera sensor is to light.

my pictures using ISO

picking my favourite pictures:

I started by flagging my favourite images and giving them rankings from 1 to 5

my 5 star pictures:

then I colour in the images:

And finally I used the compare tool to pick the image I would like to use:

As much as I like both of them I decided to choose the one on the right because I like how the light is more on the far part of the image and the closer part is darker and I think it contrasts really nicely.

Editing:

I decides to make the picture black and white because it sets an ambiance. I also removed most of the whites because I wanted my picture to be dark.

IOS controls how sensitive the camera sensor is to light.

The higher the ISO number the more sensitive your sensor and the less light is needed in your photo, however this can lead to more noise in the picture. Preferably you would want to keep the IOS as low as possible and change the studio lighting instead if possible or go outside as daylight is always better quality light. However, some photographers use the “noise” created by high ISO to their advantage for artistic purpose to give the image an “old” feel to it or to accentuate the concept meaning behind their image.

You can see here the noise appear in the photo and the quality of the image decrease as more light is let in through IOS. This is why keeping a correct ISO for the environment you’re shooting in.

First I took some images inside the corridor where there was still some natural light. I took a set of seven images each at a different ISO setting but keeping all other settings the same. The first image of the corridor in the blog I took at ISO-800. The second at the highest possible ISO setting on the camera i was using which was ISO-6400 where you can clearly see the “noise” seep into the image as the sensor takes in more light than necessary to create a clear image and instead it ends up with almost a pixelated look.

For the second image I went to the fire exit door to use the bright natural light. I took the images not even a few seconds apart so the lighting outside did not change I also did not change any other setting other than the ISO and the difference is very obvious. This proves that the ISO is what causes the over exposure that forms the “noise”.

A shutter speed and exposure photoshoot was taken to understand how each skill is done

Through Adobe Lightroom I used ‘P’ and ‘X’ which allowed me to flag the photos I think looked best and which show a clear understanding of each skill

Original Images

These are my edited photos

Purpose of Lightroom

Lightroom is typically used for selection, rating and editing of many images, contrary to Photoshop which is typically only used for high levels of editing on one or few images. After a photoshoot, you could use Lightroom to organise your photos into a collection and rate them based off numerous factors (e.g. what you photographed, quality of photograph) to pinpoint your best photos, after which you can edit them all at once on Lightroom and/or select the best few to edit thoroughly using Photoshop.

Creation of Catalogues

When I first opened Lightroom, I had to create a personal catalogue – I named this catalogue my name and saved it in the video data drive.

Importing Images

I then had to import some of my images into Lightroom, using the import button on the bottom left of the interface.

Once I selected import, I then had to choose a path to import my images from, which in my case was from the media drive.

Once I had selected this path, all my images appeared and I could choose which ones to import into Lightroom.

Creation of Collections

Next, I made a collection specifically for my shutter speed photography. To do this, I clicked the plus sign next to collections to create a new collection, titled it Shutter Speed and dragged and dropped the images I had imported into this collection.

By doing this, I can sort my large gallery of photographs into smaller groups, for example instead of having all my photographs in one area making it hard to differentiate and identify them I can split them into unique collections (e.g. a collection for aperture, another for shutter speed etc.)

Selection Functions

I then had the option to select and rate my images in different ways – one thing you can do is flag your images as good or bad using either the P key (for good) or the X key (for bad), allowing you to then filter out which images you want to see using the flagged filter which removes the images you marked as bad from view. You can also rate your pictures from 1-5 stars and then filter them by these star ratings.

Develop Mode

After learning how to import images, create collections and rate/filter images in library mode I then learnt how to use develop mode. This mode is used when you need to do major editing on one particular image (similar to Photoshop), unlike library mode which can be used to make small quick adjustments to multiple images.

At the bottom, there is a before and after view option which I could use to compare my edited image to its original version and identify strengths and weaknesses of both images, then make further adjustments if needed.

Develop mode has many presets which can be used to make quick edits of your images (an example is above where I have used the black and white PB02 preset), or you can make lots of adjustments manually to really transform the image into a successful one you like. I spent a while using the manual developing features, and then produced an edited version of my image which I am satisfied with.

Contact Sheets

A contact sheet is like a photo gallery of all your raw (unedited) images – using a contact sheet, you can colour code and organise your images to highlight the successful/unsuccessful ones as well as grouping your images to show the intention and thought process behind your work.

William Klein

William Klein was a photographer well known for his unique contact sheets where he drew over and colour coded images to identify and group them, showing his thought process behind his pictures and clearly identifying what he considered his strongest work. This unique, almost artistic approach to contact sheets and photographer was ultimately what made him stand out and be unique compared to other photographers of his time.

What is Adobe Lightroom Classic?

Lightroom Classic provides all the editing tools you need on your computer to enhance your photos. You can boost colours, turn boring images into eye-catching ones, eliminate unwanted distractions, and fix crooked pictures.

I learnt to use Lightroom today.

First I learnt to import photos into Lightroom.

I then put all of my imported photos into a collection, this was stored in the D drive (Video Data).

I then learnt how to rate photos with the 5 star feature. furthermore I then used the flagging system to pick which photos I liked and which photos I didn’t.

After learning the basics I then decided to play around with the develop mode and learn how to effectively edit one image at a time.

I used this menu on the right hand side to edit and change my image to improve many different aspects of it.

This is how the image looked after I edited it, the main noticeable difference is the vibrancy change to make the image much more appealing.

Using the side by side comparison future the differences are clearly shown.

I then learnt to use the pre-set filters.

Contact Sheets

What are Contact Sheets?

A contact sheet is a type of photographic paper that displays a collection of small images. These images are taken from a roll of film that the photographer has sliced into several strips. The photographer then places these negatives on the sheet to see all the images side by side, making it easier to compare them.

Contact Sheet example

Willian Klein

William Klein (April 19, 1926 – September 10, 2022) was a photographer and filmmaker who was born in the U.S. but later became a French citizen. He was known for his unique and ironic style in both photography and filmmaking, often using unconventional techniques in photojournalism and fashion photography. Klein was recognized as the 25th most influential photographer by Professional Photographer magazine in their list of the top 100 photographers.

Work example