How to Use the ISO Feature in Digital Cameras

Video Transcript

"Well, ISO was covered a little bit earlier, but now I'm gonna show you how easy it is to change on your camera. Now, my camera has two ways that you can do it. If you have it in the fully automatic function, it really makes it simple for you. Just on the back, you just press up on this disc and it chooses your ISO and you only have two choices. You have auto ISO or high ISO. Now the reason that's important is because of how I explained how low ISO and high ISO's work. If you are in a dark situation then you know you need a high ISO. If I go back to the aquarium example and you've turned the flash off so you're shooting through the glass and now you know there's not enough light for you to capture a decent image so you need to turn the ISO to high. The camera will go ahead and pick a nice high film speed so that it can get as much light as possible and stop your image so that you don't have a lot of blurring or camera shake. I know on this one, if I turn my camera to manual, which a lot of these cameras have this awesome manual function, I can just go to here, I move it to manual and now when I press ISO, I can choose everything from auto and high like we just talked about, but I also have the option of one hundred speed film, two hundred speed film, four hundred, eight hundred or sixteen hundred speed film. So, if I'm shooting a sporting event, I might go ahead and put it on sixteen hundred speed because I know I'm gonna want to stop that action or if I'm just taking some nice portraits and I have a lot of light coming in I might go ahead and decide to put it on one hundred speed film especially if I'm shooting a maybe a macro or a very close up type of image. It's so easy to do and the great benefit of having a digital camera over a film camera is you can change your ISO every single time you take a picture where traditionally you would have to use twelve, twenty-four, or thirty-six exposure, whatever the roll of film is that you bought at that same film speed. Whether it be two hundred, or four hundred or one hundred, you were sort of stuck using that film speed. Here it's great so make sure you change it when you need to and it's a great tool for you to use."