Shot at ISO 400

Now once you know this, then think for a moment what you hope to achieve by dragging along a tripod. Using a lower ISO means you have richer photos. Switch to higher ISO means more image chroma and luminance noise (grains in the image).

Being steady does help as long as your subject does not move! So plan your shots! How do you know if your subject is going to move? Well, use your judgement.

When you subject moves, then this is what you get

In a low light environment, where your subject is moving (like in a dance) then you have no choice but to switch on to a higher ISO. This is done to allow the shutter speed to freeze the movement. A slower ISO means your subject’s movement will be blurred. Geddit? So use this carefully to get the images you want.

Sometimes blurred images is what you want, so using a low ISO would better serve your needs. However if you are shooting something or someone without the benefit of a flash unit or external flash gun, you may just have to use a higher ISO to capture the image. Depending on which camera you are using, the ISO capabilities of both the Lumix and the Pen handle things differently. For one, the G series Lumix GH-1 has better ISO capabilities at ISO1600 than compared to the GF-1 or G1. Whereas the EP-1 and EP-2, they can produce pretty acceptable images at ISO1600.

Shot at ISO 800 with the G1

How the camera deals with Chroma and Luminance noise is another matter. Most camera manufacturers have this smoothen out in camera. That means the signal from the camera sensor is processed to clean up the noise artefacts.

Nikon has done a tremendous job in doing this at the firmware level with the D3 and till now, they are the trailblazers. But that isn’t to say that Panasonic or Olympus has done a bad job. They can manage the image to noise ratio quite well and I am not complaining. Having come from a film background, we had to push our film to ISO 1600 or ISO3200 or buy custom High ISO film to do this and it cost a bomb. That is why we rarely go beyond ISO 800. These days, thanks to technology, we can expect any entry level DSLR to capture images at ISO800 with good results. No doubt this will climb higher once they figure out how to handle the dynamic range and high ISO requirements and who knows….some software dude might just have the solution planned already for the next generation of Lumix and Pen cameras.