ISO settings, and other ramblings

eques wrote:

Trevor Carpenter wrote:

FingerPainter wrote:

eques wrote:

I set high ISO myself on my GX7, when I need fast shutter speeds in A mode for fast moving objects.

If you care about shutter speeds being fast enough to freeze subject motion, which may change from shot to shot, then why are you in A mode? Being in A mode ought to mean that you don't care what the shutter speed is.

As an aviation photographer, It's worth saying that for fast jets etc, I and virtually everybody who shoots planes shoots in A Mode. This means that you are shooting at the best aperture for your lens and that you are controlling DOF which can be very important. Ideally we want our shutter speeds as fast as achievable so we are watching constantly what the camera is selecting. If it falls below 1/1000 that may be time to up the ISO, or compromise the shutter speed or the aperture.

Shooting props or for panning we change to shutter priority because it becomes the most important parameter

I get the above mentioned problem when photographing stage scenes. Lighting changes often and abruptly, so M is no choice. So I set F2,8 on the 40-150 and ISO 1600 on the camera in A mode and hope for frozen movements.

So you adjust a setting of what isn't what you want to control, and hope you get the effect you do want to control.

Doesn't sound all that effective to me.

The situation you describe is a classic case for using Auto-ISO.

If lighting changes often, and by a significant amount, and you set the ISO so that it nearly always gives you a fast enough shutter, then most of the time you will have a faster shutter than you need, and thus most of the time your image will be noisier than it needs to be.

Is there one shutter speed that you are confident will give you sufficient freezing of subject motion? Use it as the minimum shutter speed to configure Auto-ISO, then use A mode with Auto-ISO enabled. In contrast to your haphazard approach, you will always freeze motion and you will never have images that are noisier than they need to be.

Of course this isn't much help if your camera is so feature-crippled that it will not let you specify a minimum shutter speed for use with Auto-ISO.