Don't forget your ISO!

click on image for a better view

I posted this picture of Leo on Flicker a while back. I used Leo for my color balance and set the ISO at 6400.

A lot of photographers I know set the ISO on their cameras to 400 or even 800 and forget about it just like they set their color balance on Auto and forget about it for life.
I have been known to play wild and loose with high ISO values. For the most part we amateurs can get away with that. If don't enlarge past 8X10, or, as in my case, the vast majority of your pictures get displayed on the Internet, IPOD, or computer, ISO settings are not all that critical.
Take the extreme example of Leo's picture shot at ISO 6400. As long as I don't enlarge this photo past 8X10, the image is perfectly acceptable. I will shoot at this ISO without hesitation if the need arises.
Now, the way I arrive at the correct ISO is very simple. I almost always shoot in aperture priority mode. If I'm trying to shoot at ISO 100 at f/9 and the camera tells me I'm going to be shooting hand held with a 15 second exposure, I know I have a problem.
A good example of a recent shoot was my visit to Antelope Canyon.

click on image for a better view

Antelope Canyon is dark. It's beautiful and it's dark. I did bring a tripod and that was a smart move on my part. People are just waisting their time trying to shoot hand-held in the canyon. This photo was shot with the ISO set at 800 for a 1.6 second exposure at f/7.1

I had several variables I had to balance in my head and do so very quickly because the tour guides are very nice and helpful, but they also have a schedule to keep.

I wanted good depth of field which comes with the higher aperture numbers and correspondingly smaller lens opening. It's hard to see in the canyon and I did not want a bunch of blurred images due to a shallow dof. I also did not want to wait forever to expose my image because people are constantly moving around in there. I did not want to dirty up my pictures with a lot of noise because I figured I would want to enlarge some of those pictures to 11X14 or even 20X30.

Those are the shooting parameters I had in Antelope Canyon.

My decision was to go with f/7.1 for a pretty deep dof.

That forced the rest of the numbers. I did not have any particular ISO in mind, but starting raising it up from 200.

At ISO 800 I got what I thought a good compromise and stuck with that.

That is pretty much how I arrive at all my shooting decisions. The ambient light and my preferred depth of field then force the ISO setting in order to have a decent shutter speed.

Going hand held in the case of Antelope Canyon would have forced me to shoot at ISO 6400, something I absolutely did not want to do because I also want some large prints made. The tripod also comes into play in all of these calculations.

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