Another Word About ISO Settings

Another Word About ISO Settings

By William Lulow

I really need to say something more about some of the technical aspects of exposure for action photography these days. Equipment has gotten so much better in the last maybe ten years or so, that we can now shoot at ISO settings way above normal which allows us to stop lenses down much more to get really incredibly sharp images. Look at this image:

A picture of my granddaughter at her latest swim meet. It was made with the following settings:

ISO 4000

F/2.8 @ 1/1000th of a second

Canon 85mm, f/1.8 lens

I have been making images of musicians for years. First with film where I would push Tri-X to ISO (ASA then) 1600, then push process it in Acufine developer which would yield images like this:

This image of Billy Preston, sometimes known as the “fifth Beatle,” was made with my old Nikon F camera, 200mm Nikkor f/4 lens, wide open, using an ISO (ASA) setting of 1600. These old photographs cannot compare with the ones I’m getting today. 

Here is one of my performance images made with the setting below: 

These were acceptable for 16×10″ prints and were reproduced in newspapers. Most of my performance images are made with settings of ISO 2500, f/5.6 at 1/250th of a second. 

But the images I’ve been making lately with really high ISO numbers have really been spectacular. I continue to be amazed at the resolving power of the lenses and the digital sensors in the Canon cameras I use. I haven’t even made the switch to mirrorless cameras yet because my old Canon 90D has a 32 megapixel sensor. Many of the newer Hasselblad digital cameras have sensors that will resolve images to about 50 megapixels or so and the Canon r5, mirrorless cameras have resolving power to about 45 megapixels. And when used at standard studio settings of ISO 100 with an aperture of f/11, yields truly sharp images that can be enlarged many times. Here is a typical example:

So the quality of images has gotten much better. For my money, there is just no comparison to what the old 35mm film used to do. Years ago I stopped using my 35mm Nikons in favor of view cameras and medium format ones. The Hasselblad 500 c/m was my go to camera for most portraits in the studio. I used the 150mm Sonnar lens as my regular portrait lens. I have written about my preference of the medium format cameras before, but now the current crop of DSLRs are every bit as good at producing pore-revealing portraits like the one above. 

The takeaway here is that you can experiment with higher ISO settings which allow smaller apertures and faster shutter speeds to catch peak action and make clearer images that can stand good enlargement.