Finding a High ISO “Sweet Spot”

LED studio lighting systems are a good match for today’s high performance SLRs that have high ISO capabilities. When testing Rotolight’s Anova LED studio light I shot an ISO bracket to see what ISO settings would work best in my studio, ultimately producing a test strip showing a bracket from ISO 400 through 500, 640, 800, 1000, 1250, and 1600. Can you tell the difference?

With the camera I used at the time, the real differences between 400 and 1600 is so small that I could only see it at large magnifications, so I ended up shooting from 640 to 1600 depending on the specific application.

As cameras such as the Lumix GH4 gets better and better at higher ISO settings, make you own tests because your camera will certainly be different. Take a few minutes to make a bracket of ISO settings, evaluate them on a monitor and make your decisions based on real data not just by Kentucky windage.

Using the information in areal world situation: Photographing in my spare bedroom has always been a challenge because of the intense contrast from the window behind my subject even though the blinds are almost closed tight. Here Rotolight’s Anova was placed at camera left and color balanced with their Magic Eye smartphone app.

This is the first acceptable result that I have ever been able to get when shooting in my inherently contrasty spare bedroom. The Anova was placed at camera left and color balanced with the Magic Eye app.

Camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH3 with 12-35mm f/2.8 lens (at 33mm) and an exposure of 1/200 sec at f/2.8 and ISO 800.