Taking Photographs

(5 - The Evolution - Low Lighting ) or Back to Table of Contents

Suppose it's time to photograph a romantic setting. You suddenly realize all the pictures will be taken in a dimly lit room. Now is when learning about the shutter-speed, aperture, ISO, and other functions will pay off. Since getting light is really the main goal of your camera you'll encounter limitations without good light. To overcome these there are a few things you can do.

Changing the lighting type will give a warm or less warm appearance with colors

1) Turn on a light. The most obvious answer is to turn on some lights in the room. If you can't or don't want to do this then you'll need a flash for your camera. Getting the proper lighting with flash is an entire chapter by itself. For a romantic photograph setting a flash would not be appropriate.

2) Open the aperture wider. This is probably set for you if in "automatic" mode but the closer to f/1.2 the better if you care to do some manual adjustments. Experiment with this a bit in manual mode.

3) Opening the shutter longer (using a long exposure) is probably what your automatic mode will do. Whenever you open the shutter for a long time you will need a tripod or some other support to hold your camera still. Not using a tripod means you will photograph some very creative and blurry images. You'll only want this if doing it on purpose. In the balloon image below the camera shutter was open for a long exposure. During that time some balloons moved and became blurry and some did not. Instead of a tripod I put the camera upon a fence post and started the self-timer mode.

4) Raise the ISO speed a bit. This is probably set for you if in "automatic" as well. You may or may not be able to change it with ease on a point and shoot camera. If you can change it then don't get carried away or your image will look very grainy or noisy. One or two levels faster and the image will complete quicker.

Even with the camera sitting steady on a fence some of the objects in the distance moved

another tool for dark photographs...

Technical Mumbo Jumbo: (ISO SPEED)

When it comes to speeding up your camera's capture to take pictures you may also hear the term ISO speed. Long ago this was the sensitivity of hard-copy film to light. You changed your film when you knew what type of lighting situation you would photograph. Many photographers in the film days would take more than one camera with different ISO films just in case different circumstances for photography presented itself. With digital cameras this is one of three ways to take faster pictures and switching ISO is at the push of a button.

Nowadays the ISO speed is the light sensitivity setting of the electronic sensor. It determines when the image is complete. Imagine the ISO as taking and average of how bright a dot is in your image. If you have an ISO of 100 the camera can take in dozens of dots and conclude that indeed this dot is light gray over a period and an average of many numbers. Now you take a very dark image with a super fast ISO of 1600. The camera is told to open the shutter and look once or twice to tell how bright that same dot remains. After only one view the camera sees a light gray but doesn't have a large number of samples to average. In the dark shadows of this high ISO image there are speckles all over the image where it found some dark areas red, orange, or whatever the sample to the brightness was. The trade-off with the high ISO is that the image average is fast but the overall image hopefully isn't blurry where the camera waited a large amount of time to make it's decision.

Moving the ISO from 100 to a higher ISO means you'll need about half the light before your camera acknowledges the image is complete. For fast motion shots and low lighting shots this can be particularly useful. The ISO can go from 100 up to 3200 and beyond potentially. Most point and shoots have 100 to 400 ISO settings. Using the wrong ISO speed can leave your images extremely noisy or grainy looking but it remains another flexible tool if used within reason.

An ISO of 100 is for slow shots where you want good quality but the subject is slow as well. An ISO of 12800 H2 on top of the line cameras would be for very fast shots but will appear very noisy or grainy on some cameras. Zooming into an image of only 1600 ISO will often show this noise in the dark areas. It becomes apparent in the quality difference. However, changing the ISO may give you an extra edge if you have already worked with the shutter speed and aperture we discuss next. The quality versus noise is the trade-off for this option. Each camera's ISO becomes grainy at a different number and you'll have to learn yours. You'll want the lowest ISO speed you can get with the image still in focus and quality you want. Now you'll at least know what it is even if you don't change the ISO settings. On many cameras you can move the ISO up to 400 with little quality difference. Again, your camera may vary.

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Written Jan08 and updated Sept08 by - Tracy Lee Rose