More about using ISO…

In the last post I showed a photo taken in low light using a very high ISO setting. The resulting image is well lit and has very little digital noise. In this post I am showing three versions of a photo where I used a higher ISO setting for a different purpose — capturing a moving object.

While waiting for Eddie outside the YMCA gym on Martin Luther King Day, two boys were skateboarding on the entrance ramp to the closed public library. I had a 70 to 300mm lens on the camera, and I wanted to shoot with a fast shutter speed to capture the motion. By uping the ISO, in this case just to 400, the image senor was able to capture the image with less light — and I was able to use a higher shutter speed to freeze the action. The camera was set at 1/2000th of a second at f/8.

The image was digitally processed in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4. I decided that the background colors took away from the image, so I muted the background in Lightroom. Using Photoshop I added a blur to the background to add to the feeling of movement — although I am not sure I am really happy with the results of this last version of the image.

A final note If you have been following my blog since the beginning of 2010, you may have noted that the copyright notice on all of the photos, up until today, have said 2009. My mistake! Most of the photos were taken since New Year's, but I forgot to change the year on my import metadata. It has now been corrected.