High ISO – Don’t Worry, Just Shoot

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

“What me, Worry?”—Alfred E. Neuman

Indoor car shows are notorious for their bad lighting. Unless the car owner brings their own lights you usually have to deal with typical convention center lighting that is not flattering for much of anything. When I photographed the Portland Roadster Show last year I tried to keep my ISO setting low to reduce noise and I ended up with a lot of slightly out of focus images because my shutter speed dropped too low because the ISO was too low.

This year I decided that sharpness was more important than noise so I set the ISO wherever it needed to be to get a good shutter speed and aperture. As long as I was going for sharpness why not get depth-of-field too?

I fully expected to come home to images that needed to have noise reduction applied or were unusable above ISO 3200. I shot both RAW and JPEG files to see what the difference was. I prefer the RAW files at higher ISO’s since it gives me control over how I want the image to look. I spent about two minutes on each of these images in Lightroom CC including noise reduction.

All of the images these images were taken with a Panasonic Lumix GH5.