"Basic Photography with Bake along #3 - ISO"

Hey guys, before I fret with today’s topic, I want to thank all of you for reading me so patiently. With your encouragement we are in our 3rd week of this write up and I’m also learning something on daily basis. Till now we are familiar with Aperture and shutter speed. Today’s topic is ISO but before that I want to share a few pictures with you guys which I clicked from my phone camera, just to show that for photography you don’t always require a DSLR. Photography is all about appropriate light and that perfect setting about which I will tell you in my next article. For now can u see these pretty beauties?

If you don’t have a DSLR that doesn’t mean this write up is not useful for you. Because as I’ve mentioned on the very first day that you are the “boss”. With good lighting, a little decoration, proper focus and angle you can click great pics with any camera. You already have an advantage here because the object in your food photography is beautiful and always appealing to every eye :p Further, you can refine your photographs with post processing. I will cover all these aspects during the next few sessions. I’m telling you these basics because it is always better to know about basics of any subject.

You must be thinking why and how this is useful to you? But believe me it is, like all of you out there have in-depth knowledge of baking. What is the difference between Baking powder and baking soda? I’m sure, you know that because you have intense knowledge of your subject and you are always ready to learn new things. This is very good. So just imagine, after few months or so when you need to upgrade your camera or you want a photo shoot for your business, you can tell that photographer, oh! I need more light. Please reduce the shutter speed or I need you to focus on that basil leaf or cherry, please reduce the f/stop to 1.8. I’m sure he would not only be impressed of your knowledge but also think that I can’t fool this person.

The next thing I want to tell you is about focus. Most of the time people including me click few pictures in which subject are out of focus and they don’t even realize that. Like in the following picture I want to capture the front flower but focus of my camera was on back flowers. So the main object was blurred and flowers on the back are very sharp.

                                                                                            

When my f/stop is low, I should keep this thing in mind that focus area will also be less for my camera. So in my next picture I rectified the mistake. These few small things make your picture perfect so keep them in mind while clicking.

Now we come back to today’s topic. Aperture, shutter speed and ISO are like 3 sides of a triangle in photography. ISO is the last part and sometimes it is very useful .

International organization for standardization (ISO) developed by American Standards Association (ASA), indicates how sensitive a film is to light. ISO is measured in ISO numbers like 200, 250, 320, 500 etc. there is no symbol for ISO settings, I’ll recommend you to refer your manual because every camera has their own ISO numbers.

Low ISO numbers indicate less sensitivity and a finer grain or more sharpness in digital photography. Can you guess what example I will give in this scenario? Yes, most of you have guessed my example. So here you go, imagine what everyone loves? A fine grain Cake! We all pray that our cake should have a fine grain texture, majority of people don't like coarse grain cake. Same with ISO, the lower the number the better the picture. Our pictures will have fine grains, sharp and crisp details on lower ISO number. Higher the number of ISO, the picture will become grainy or noisy.

ISO 1250

ISO 3200

But then this question must be coming in your mind that why we need ISO? There are two advantages of ISO.

1. Imagine you are working in low lit area, you can't reduce shutter speed after a limit because your hand will shake but you need the picture to be bright, then ISO comes to our rescue. By increasing the number of ISO the picture will become bright. In the following pictures aperture and shutter speed are constant, the only thing I've changed is ISO.

ISO 400

ISO 1000

But always keep in mind if you increase the ISO after a certain number your picture will become grainy/noisy and it will loose sharpness as depicted in the above Rose pictures .

2. Sometimes grainy pictures look good especially when you want to create some drama into it. You can use these grains when you don't require sharpness. In the following picture of Cherry flowers, petals are not distinguishable due to less sharpness caused by high ISO setting.

But Grains/Noise in a black and white picture sometimes looks good.

Do remember that lower ISO captures more vivid colours. So next time when you click photos in extremely bright environment then happily use a lower ISO setting. I preferably use ISO between 100-400 according to light conditions.

So with ISO we have completed the basics of camera. Next time I'll come up with the most important and interesting concept of photography, specially food photography which is "Lighting" :)