What does ISO in photography?

If you have ever opened your camera applications pro mode or used a DSLR camera, you will have come across the term ISO. ISO is a very important concept to understand if you want your pictures to look good.
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ISO is basically your camera lens sensitivity to light. ISO itself stands for International Organization for Standardization. It is an international standard of how we measure camera lens sensitivity to the lens. 

Lens by Yael Yañez via Unsplash

ISO is represented in a series of numbers. The most common values you will see are 100,200,400,800,1600 and 3200. While these are the most common values, almost all modern camera offer values in between like ISO 125 or ISO 170, etc. In fact, there are high-end cameras that can go as far up as ISO 6400 and ISO 25600.
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By controlling the ISO of your camera lens, you can control how sensitive to light your camera lens is. The lower the ISO number, the darker the image. For example, an ISO 100 image will look pretty dark indoors. If we keep on increasing ISO, the image becomes more bright as it captures more light. 

Lens and a Moutain Lake by Paul Skorupskas via Unsplash

ISO works in conjunction with other exposure variables like aperture and shutter speed. Increasing shutter speed time also lets you capture a brighter image, as your camera lens is exposed for a longer period to capture more light.

But having a long shutter speed doesn’t always work. Especially in the case where you have to photograph a fast-moving object. A long shutter speed will make the image blurry.

​So in this case you can use ISO to help brighten the image. First, you will decrease the shutter speed to capture the fast-moving object. And then counteract any loss of brightness from thus by increasing your ISO. 

Phone Lens by Jess Bailey via Unsplash

But increasing ISO isn’t without its drawbacks. One major drawback of increasing your camera lens ISO is that the image becomes noisier. The more you increase your ISO values, the noisier it gets. While modern sensors are getting better and better at reducing this noise. It is still very much a concern when playing with ISO values.

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