The Pursuit of Pretty Pictures ~ Lesson Dos

Lesson two of camera school is about ISO. Oh no, a scary acronym ...

Shimelle does a great job breaking down ISO without going all technical. Basically, ISO is how much light your camera lets in when it takes a photo. It is also known as "exposure". No, not that kind of exposure.

It's the other kind, the kind that has to do with light. Or that's how I understand it, at least. Real photographer peeps are sighing heavily. But that's okay. Let me be stupid. My stupidity! You can't have it.

Anyway, there's a really basic rule to follow when you first start out:

The more light, the less ISO.

According to Shimelle, good settings to start out with are 100, 400, and 800. 100 is for sunny shots, 400 is for semi-sunny shots, and 800 is for un-sunny shots (try saying that 10 times fast).

As you get more experience, you may find that you like different settings as there are no set ISO standards from camera brand to camera brand.

Here's my experiments. I took pictures of my Boston Terrier Bean in a semi-sunny location. They are SOOC (straight out of camera) except for adding text.

See the difference? 100 ISO is too dark. 800 ISO is way overexposed. But 400 ISO is just right, which makes sense because this was taken in a semi-sunny place (AKA my bed).

Now if I can just remember to set the ISO correctly when I'm taking pics! Remember, if all else fails, use photo editing software (which is camera school lesson 3, actually). It corrects a multitude of newbie photographer sins.

original - too dark

with Picnik auto-correct ... much better

I am learning as I go along that photography is mostly a matter of experimenting. Which means taking about 50,000 photos. But that's okay!

I learned something new! Woo!

Caiti