Don't be afraid of high ISO. Embrace the grain

I read a lot of photography blogs, books, and magazines, and one "tip" I seem to read just about everywhere is that you should always shoot at the lowest possible ISO. The reason is that, all things being equal, the lower the ISO the less grain (or noise in digital) your photograph will have.

While I understand the reasoning for this and agree in most cases, the reality is that people tend to obsess with this to the point of never wanting to shoot at high ISO's. It seems to me there's something about ISO400 that many people seem to believe anything above that is not useable. It may come from the film days, when film at ISO400 was considered the slow one and used by many photojournalists in low light situations. Higher ISO's let you use faster shutter speeds and avoid blurry photographs due to camera shake.

Well, I may be the only one, but I believe there's something beautiful about grain and I regularly shoot in black and white at ISO1600 and above. I love shooting at night this way. And I usually use my little Panasonic LX3, a point and shoot with a small sensor, for this style of photography. It's small and unobtrusive and doesn't call for attention, a good thing when you're shooting alone at night in the middle of the city!

Yes, the files are noisy and there's very little detail in the shadows. But who says that's bad? Why?

I say embrace the grain and go for it. Give it a try one day... grab any camera you have, set it to ISO1600, black & white, and go out and document your town at night. Don't even look at the display after each shot. Just keep shooting. You'll be impressed with the photographs you come back with. They'll be really grainy (unless you have a Nikon D3 or similar), but who cares? They'll have attitude. They'll be emotional. They'll tell a story. And most importantly, they'll exist.

I was thinking about this today as I walked back to the car park and, since I had my LX3 with me, I decided to take a few photographs specifically for this post. All the photos were shot a few hours ago and they're straight out of the camera. I didn't want to do any post-processing as the point was about shooting black and white photography at ISO1600. All I did was set the camera to shoot in JPEG, ISO1600, Aperture Priority, aperture at f/2.0, manual focus (pre-focused to about 2 meters), and shot away.

The photographs aren't especially good, but I hope they serve to get my point across. None of these would've been possible at ISO80 or even ISO400 because it was too dark. They exist because I embraced the grain.

By the way, in case you're wondering where this is... it's in Sydney, Australia. The first image (with the LOOK) is what's written in the street at crossings because tourists tend to look the wrong way before crossing the street. Australians drive on the left side of the road.

Comments

[jim]

Great article. I've always been scared of going to ISO's higher than 400 as that seems to be what I read everywhere, but you're right id rather get a photo even if grainy than not get it at all. I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing.