ISO 6400 Feels Dangerous Until You Learn This

So if you've ever wondered how much ISO actually matters and how high you can go before things start to fall apart, whether you've been quietly damaging your photos without realising it, then this video is going to answer all of that properly. But before we get into it, comment below for me what camera are you using And what's the highest ISO that you're genuinely comfortable using it at? That's really interesting for other people because they can often spot their cameras within the comments and see what ISO values people are prepared to go up to on them. So one of the reasons that ISO is so confusing is because it's usually explained in a way. That's misleading. People often say that ISO increases the sensor's sensitivity to light, but that isn't what actually happens. So here's a way to think about it for you. Raising the ISO is much like turning the volume up on a stereo system. The band that's on the file that you're listening to doesn't actually play louder. You're just boosting the signal. There are only three things when you're doing photography that actually make your picture brighter. One of them is shutter speed, so how long the shutter's open for. The other is the aperture of your lens, like how wide the aperture is. And the other one is the amount of light in the scene that you're photographing. And that's it. There really isn't anything else. So ISO doesn't create or let in more light. It just amplifies what the sensor has already captured. So as soon as you turn your camera on, every camera sensor produces a certain amount of noise naturally. And that noise is always there, all the time. So you can think of it a bit like an old analog radio. You know the ones that would have to be tuned in manually. When they're not in tune there's this sort of rushing and hissing noise in the background. That's not caused by tuning, that noise is just there. When the radio locks onto a signal, like a radio station, that signal is strong enough to override that background noise. And photography works in the same way. The light hitting the sensor, when there's plenty of it in daylight or in controlled light, the signal is so strong But that noise, that grain, that disappears underneath that signal. So that's when you get clean looking images, not because the noise doesn't exist, but because the signal is winning that battle between the noise and the signal. Now, when you're in difficult lighting, maybe indoors, late in the afternoon or anything where the light is doing something interesting, but there's not necessarily as much of it. Then you're dealing with a weaker signal and when you raise the ISO to compensate for this, what you're doing is you're actually amplifying that weak signal and as you do that, the noise comes up with it. So the noise was already there. Boosting the ISO is just revealing it more, it's not creating it. So you'll hear people say things like high ISO doesn't matter anymore, the modern cameras have basically solved the problem. I kind of want to avoid that though because that's not really the issue. The main one is dynamic range. So dynamic range is the gap between the brightest stuff in the picture and the darkest stuff in the picture. That's in the scene that we're photographing. The dynamic range of the sensor is its ability to capture that. So different sensors have different amounts of dynamic range that they can capture. And that changes as you change the ISO. So as the noise floor rises as we raise the ISO, you lose headroom in the highlights. In high contrast situations that matters. It's worth knowing but it's not worth obsessing over. For most shooting conditions on a modern camera this matters less than people think. But it is real and it is worth knowing it. So I want to be clear that shooting at a low ISO is genuinely the correct thing to do in certain situations. Maybe your subject is still and you've got plenty of light, maybe you're on a tripod. And actually, I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently, about how we think about imperfection. Not as a consolation, like, oh, it's okay if it's not perfect, but as something that actually makes photographs more interesting. There are these images that I see constantly where everything is technically correct, sharp from edge to edge, clean, perfect exposure, no noise whatsoever because they've been using, like, AI to get rid of all the noise. And what you're left with is something that's completely... Lifeless. There's nothing interesting to hold on to anymore. You just look at it and you move on. And then you get images that are slightly wrong in some way and you can't stop looking at them. I think the most interesting photographs usually have something that's like a little bit wrong with them. They have some grain in there, perhaps the shadows of falls unexpectedly. Maybe there's some motion blur in there or maybe the image is a little bit soft, but it works. Those things make it feel like something that actually happened rather than being something, let's say, that was performed for the camera. And I don't think that feeling's accidental. I think that's the difference between a photograph that was made and a photograph that was managed. So a managed photograph. So heavily. monitored and checked that there's nothing emotionally left in it anymore. What viewers actually see, and here's the thing about noise that photographers just often forget, viewers don't see it the way that you do. So you've spent hours with your own pictures, you've looked at them at 100%, maybe even 200% zoom, and you've catalogued them and you've judged them, and you're And you're probably the worst possible judge of whether the noise in your image is a problem. problem or not, because you're potentially looking at it from completely the wrong angle. So what people actually respond to is whether an image makes them feel something. Nobody ever looks at a photograph and thinks, well, that's an extraordinary photograph, but it's such a shame that it's shot ISO 3200. But all the people that would counter and say, ah, yes, but if you could do the same thing and it's clean, I would say to you, no, because there's so many other variables that go into changing that. And that's where it all starts to fall apart again. And clean is not always expressive. So I think the obsession with technical cleanliness is in a lot of cases, a way of having an opinion about photography without having to engage with whether the photograph You can have good quality light, but there's not much of it. You can have loads of light, and there's not very good quality. So in the situation where we've got good quality lights, but there is not a lot of it, that's where the ISO is going to be, wherever it needs to be. That is not a compromise at that point. That is you making a decision to take the picture and make it look the way it should. And make it look the way it should. The ISO number is a consequence of just choosing to use that light it's not a cost that you're paying that's what I need you to get out of the idea that it's a cost that you're paying. So what I've found, and this probably sounds obvious once you hear it, is that the photographers who produce work that is the most interesting work in difficult conditions are not the ones who are managing their ISO levels the best. They're the ones who have stopped thinking about ISO entirely actually. So the thing to remember is that technical perfection and emotional content are not the same thing. Sometimes, in fact, they're actually in opposite directions of each other. So that kind of shift from managing settings to responding to the light that actually exists and doing something with it that makes people feel something is exactly what's in my editing workshops. That's what they're about. It's not about fixing bad images afterwards, it's understanding how to make decisions in your editing that help people feel something when they look at your work. The workshops are linked in the description down below. Also check out my eBooks, they're free. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see you guys again in the next one. Take care, bye bye.