More Extreme ISO Settings

More Extreme ISO Settings

by William Lulow

Note: Very high ISO settings which allow photographers to make images in very low light situations, are becoming more and more useful these days, even in normal light conditions. Here is another look at what is now achievable.

I have done many interior photographs of rooms, offices and various spaces for all kinds of purposes. Some to sell a space and some to record what was happening in a space. Interior photographs are special kinds of images that are usually made to transmit the beauty of a place. They should be well lit with certain parameters that make them useful for various purposes. Here are a couple I have made over the years: 

This is a kind of snapshot of the interior of the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

This is the interior of the showroom for Hanes Hosiery, made back in the 1980s. Lit with electronic flash lights and color balanced with the proper filtration of ambient light. It was made with Kodak Ektachrome sheet film rated at an ASA (ISO) speed of 100. 

Here is the interior of an apartment exposed and manipulated to show proper rendition of the interior AND the exterior. Even good interior photographers with images published in magazines like Architectural Digest, don’t always take the trouble to balance both indoor and outdoor light. 

And here is a hotel lobby, made with about five lights AND balanced with the daylight. So, there are many ways to shoot interiors. As a trained lighting expert, I like to take the trouble to light interiors with strobe lights to highlight certain aspects of the space. This image was made with my 4×5 Deardorff field view camera again, on Kokak Ektachrome film rated at an ASA (ISO) speed of 100. 

Up until the digital age, photographers almost always had to add artificial light to interior shots because the available film was not sensitive enough to render an entire space visible with just available light. Or, long exposures had to be made with the ambient light available in order to render an acceptable image. That has changed dramatically in the last several years.

I want you to inspect this image of a hallway in the famous hotel GREENBRIER, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which I visited earlier this year:

I reproduced this image a bit larger to enable closer inspection. This image was made with my Canon r7 camera with a 20mm f/2.8 lens. The settings were: f/5.6 @ 1/100th of a second, with an ISO of 8000! Some people were removed from the scene with the aid of Photoshop tools. Although not made for publication, I am still astounded with its clarity and depth-of-field. There were no external lights of any kind other than what was there. And, the camera was hand held which forced me to use a high enough shutter speed to catch any camera movement. You can also tell that the auto white balance selected the interior, probably because it was dominant in the frame. The outdoor light was therefore blue. 

Years ago, I would have made this shot with my view camera on a tripod, 4×5 film and maybe a 30-second exposure. If I wanted to get similar depth-of-field as in this one, I might have had to make an even longer exposure so that I could shoot with a smaller aperture. I might have even had to add a couple of strobes at various spots down the hall to add illumination to parts of the interior further away from the camera. As an interior shot, I don’t think it would be acceptable for a high-end magazine or even for inclusion in a brochure. But, I am still amazed at the detail and depth obtainable with today’s sensors. 

This is an older interior shot made on film with a combination of available light and strobe. The exposure I think, was around 30-45seconds. The camera was one of my 4×5″ view cameras. The lens was my 90mm Schneider Super Angulon, wide angle. The film was Kodak Ektachrome with a speed of ASA 100. We fired two or three strobes at 10 second intervals to augment the exposure somewhat and to aid with the color balance a bit. 

These days, I have begun using higher ISO settings when outside even when the lighting conditions don’t actually demand it. But I think digital lenses perform best when they are closed down a bit, say to f/5.6 – f/11. The images are sharper with more depth and ISO settings like 800 or even 1000 don’t seem to add appreciably to the grain (noise) of the images. Here is one, made outdoors on a sunny day. I wanted to be able to shoot with a faster-than-normal shutter speed of 1/1000th or 1/1250th of a second to be sure to stop all action. I also wanted to be sure to get enough depth-of-field so that faces as well as equipment would be sharp:

This image was made with my Canon 90D, 135mm f/2 lens. Exposure was f/11 @ 1/1250th of a second, with an ISO of 1600.

I still prefer to use ISO 100 when I am shooting in the studio with my electronic flash or with them on location. Using artificial light is a skill all its own that requires knowledge not only of light placement, but how electronic flash works and how it is applied in specialized situations. 

Note: I have published many articles on flash and how to use it. Look through older archives for some of them or leave a note and I will send them to you via email.