What ISO do you, guys, consider the highest useful/usable? Sitting at the highest level in Rogers Centre and having only Canon EF-S 55-250 mm f/4 -5.6 - not the fastest lens for sport photography - I did not have a choice but to bust ISO to be able to capture motion. This picture is taken with 3200. I find this value a maximum for my Canon 550D. Anything higher than this usually looks quite noisy. Normally I tend to use ISO values no higher than 800, preferring, of course, 100-200 but may be technology had developed beyond my expectations. What are your thoughts?
Teresa Prater Thanks for your post. Other replies I saw actually mark a trend of not being afraid of using higher ISO values up to 3200 (as in my example) or even 6400. The technology is developing very fast and noise issue is one of the known ones Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus and Fuji as well as others try to address. For my purposes, with the inexpensive equipment that I use, there is not way to capture many moments of hokey or baseball games without using high iso numbers. I still try to use flash or larger aperture whenever I can, especially indoors but on the stadium flash does not help me too much.
ReplyDeleteObviously the answer depends of your camera but also of your subject/style and may be either more of the final medium screen/paper/large format.
ReplyDeleteFuji X shooter, 1600ISO is a non brainer limit , 3200ISO is a usual limit, 6400ISO is my limit for street photography, low light scene - by the way it is also the camera limit for raw files.
Note that I shot mainly street/urban pictures in black and white.
Henri-Pierre Chavaz It is understandable that a photography style affects the controls' usage. What I tried to learn here was: how far had the technology moved in recent years? I heard that Fuji did a really good job in handling the hight ISO values. 6400 are not really useful for me with my old Canon 550D. My personal limit is 3200 for low light and sport photography (I set the hard limit in the camera to 1600 and overwrite it manually when needed).
ReplyDeleteMichael Mossiagin On the Fuji XPRO1 for street photography I set: speed 1/125" quite enough to freeze pedestrian, aperture f8 for the DOF (I trust the AF but zone focus is quicker as I do not have to either choose the focus point or reframe). That leave free the ISO that I set to auto ISO with the limits indicated above. If I need to override a parameter depending of the subject I will choose aperture or speed. The only problem is when I want to set an exposure compensation which is not working in manual mode on the fuji X.
ReplyDeleteHenri-Pierre Chavaz I normally use a similar approach with the aperture-controlled mode: set the aperture and the shutter speed and the iso are set automatically but I can set the upper limit for ISO in my settings. As I said, it is 1600.
ReplyDeleteMichael Mossiagin same on fuji, I set auto ISO with the limits mentioned above.
ReplyDelete