Using ISO Settings

[stuart52]

I am curious about using ISO settings on my new FZ20. I think I understand the concept in film of higher ISO being faster film and allowing one to capture high speed movement, but with less light. This can also be accomplished with shutter speed settings.

What happens in a digital camera when you change the ISO setting? What are the advantages of using low ISO (80) vs high ISO (400) and the consequences? Sorry if this is elsewhere on the forum, I used the search and found nothing.

I shoot my 17 yr. old daughters jazz dance team competitions where they are indoors, quick movements and flashes aren't allowed. Any suggestions on which ISO would be best? I usually set the shutter as fast as possible while still letting in enough light for exposure; unfortunately its usually 1/60th-1/80th and their movements sometimes blur. Any suggestions. I have been using an Olympus C730 with ISO at 100 and am hoping the FZ20 will give better results. Time will tell.

Stuart

[Dawoofo]

Your pictures taken at ISO 80 will be much sharper and clearer than with 400 with that particular (and most) digital camera. At ISO 400 you'll have a lot of graininess or "noise" in your pictures, especially in low light situations such as indoors without a flash, to the point they may not be very usable unless you shrink the pictures to a smaller size or use a good noice reducer program (such as Neat Image or Noise Ninja) after you load the pictures to your computer. Unfortunately, indoor pictures of movement without flash are some of the toughest to take, and there's not always a good way to do it. I tried taking pictures of my 17 year old daughter's basketball games with what I thought was pretty bright lighting, but even at ISO 200 I still got some blurs with my aperture at 2.8-3.5. I eventually resorted to taking movies with my camera instead of pictures and they seemed to do pretty well, though I really wanted pictures. :)

The best you can do is set your aperture as high as it will go (lowest numbers), use as high an ISO setting as you can live with, and see where it goes from there.

[erichlund]

I am curious about using ISO settings on my new FZ20. I think I understand the concept in film of higher ISO being faster film and allowing one to capture high speed movement, but with less light. This can also be accomplished with shutter speed settings.

What happens in a digital camera when you change the ISO setting? What are the advantages of using low ISO (80) vs high ISO (400) and the consequences? Sorry if this is elsewhere on the forum, I used the search and found nothing.

I shoot my 17 yr. old daughters jazz dance team competitions where they are indoors, quick movements and flashes aren't allowed. Any suggestions on which ISO would be best? I usually set the shutter as fast as possible while still letting in enough light for exposure; unfortunately its usually 1/60th-1/80th and their movements sometimes blur. Any suggestions. I have been using an Olympus C730 with ISO at 100 and am hoping the FZ20 will give better results. Time will tell.

Stuart
While the FZ20 is a nice camera, this is not its forte. Most fixed lens cameras have very small sensors, and they do not work well at high ISO values, rendering lots of noise into the picture. The noise can appear in several ways, but in dark areas it will appear as either white dots or multi-colored dots (I believe the former is more common).

You will want to do a bit of experimentation, but you want to use the highest ISO setting that gives acceptable results. The higher the ISO setting, the more sensitive you are setting the cameras "film", the sensor. So you get a higher shutter speed. You also want to make sure you keep the lens wide open. Fortunately, the FZ20 has a fairly fast lens, but you will want to use aperture priority and set the lens on f2.8.

Once you take your photos, you may find them too noisy to use. The first thing you should do is ignore the noise in the screen image and print a sample. You may find the printed output superior to what you see on the screen. If they are still too noisy, then you should invest in some noise reduction software, such as noise ninja. I'm sure some others will pop up with some other brands.

If you cannot get rid of enough noise to make the photos useful, then you will have to go with a lower ISO setting, but this leaves you in the position where you may start getting motion blur in your subject, because your shutter setting will be lower. One possibility here is to go full manual, and bump the shutter setting up a bit, keeping the f2.8 aperture. This will underexpose the photo, but you can recover detail in post processing. Unfortunately, one problem with this is that underexposure also increases noise artifacts, so you may not gain anything by trying this.

Another way to do this same underexposure, in a finer grained manner is to use minus exposure compensation. I don't know what the FZ20 gives you for control in this area, so you will have look at your manual.

If all this fails, rent a dSLR with an 85mm f/1.4 lens, set the ISO to 800 or 1600 and you will get great photos. But, that's a whole nuther slippery slope.

Cheers,
Eric

[ReF]

i would shoot in full manual mode and keep the aperture at f2.8, choose as fast a shutter speed as you can get, and adjust the ISO as high as you are comfortable with (like mentioned above). try this in a similar situation ahead of time if possible, and try some noise reduction software ahead of time too. the common noise redux programs are noise ninja and neat image - do a google search on them and download the free trials. if these are very special and important events then you might have to drop some serious cash on a dslr and a lens with at least a f2.8 aperture. the usual lens choices are 85mm f1.8, 50mm f1.8, 50mm f1.4, 24-70mm f2.8, 28-70mm f2.8, or 28-75mm f2.8. a nikon d50 with a 50mm f1.8 lens is surprisingly cheap nowadays. the other lenses can get a little expensive. if you don't have that kind of $$$, then try a video camera. i've seen very good videos of such events (considering the difficult conditions) out on lit fields at night.

[wxcloud9xw]

This is the problem I have with my nice fixed lens Nikon 8800. They simply just don't do well in low light conditions and they are usually too slow. Thats why I'm fixing to buy a Rebel XT DLSR so I can take great low light level shots and action shots. You can have the best fixed lens out there, which mine is one of the best fixed lens digital cameras...but they all have small photo sensors, which don't capture near as much light as DSLRs and show much more grain/noise in the photos in low light levels and generally only go up to ISO 400, when u really need 800 and 1600 iso. Ofcourse there is the new Sony 10mp fixed lens, but even its performance in low light level isn't as good as a DSLR and the noise is also higher despite the larger sensor size.