New to this site and photography!

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Leighflea8

New member
Hello, we just bought a Nikon d7000 and I love it so far. I don't understand when I need to change the ISO settings and my husband told me to just leave it on U1 and U2. Any advise on how to use my camera would be greatly appreciated! I am taking mostly pictures of landscape.
​thanks
 
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PapaST

Senior Member
Welcome to the forum. I'm sure others will chime in with great advice. U1 and U2 are "placeholders" for custom settings that a photographer would use from time to time and doesn't want to bother with setting it up each time. If you're new and don't have custom settings in mind then I would suggest shooting in P mode or maybe even Auto. Work your way up to some of the other modes.

ISO is one part of the equation for capturing a properly exposed image. ISO handles the sensor's sensitivity to light. The lower number ISO (i.e. 100) the less sensitive the sensor will be. This yields a higher quality image but requires more exposure time. The higher number ISO (i.e. 6400) produces an image that is grainier and not as sharp, but because it is very sensitive to light it allows for faster shutter speeds and smaller apertures.

Learning how this affects your image along with shutter and aperture can produce some stunning images.

The manual is actually a great resource for learning about your camera and photography in general. Hope that helps.
 
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Leighflea8

New member
Thank you. I will read the manual that came with the camera. I took some pictures this weekend, set it to iso like 1500 in daylight and they all came out dark. The ones I took with 100 iso came out good
 
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Moab Man

Senior Member
ISO of 1500 is generally for low light/night photography.

ISO and shutter speed have to work together to allow enough light in to create the picture. The best example I've read is to think of the ISO number as bees in a beehive. At ISO 100 you have 100 bees building the picture. Takes them longer to do it because there are less of them so your shutter has to stay open longer for the bees to accomplish the picture. However, they do a better job because they are not all bumping into each other.

ISO 1500 gives you 1500 bees on the same size working area. They can do the job really fast because there are so many more of them. BUT, they tend to bump into each other a lot and this causes imperfections (grain or "noise"). Because there are so many more bees the shutter only has to be opened for a very brief moment.

The key for a beginner is learning the relationship between these three points. Aperture (how big the iris of you camera opens), ISO, and shutter speed. A good way to mess with these is to take a picture in auto and see what settings the camera chose. Now switch the camera over to "M"anual and duplicate the settings. Now start messing with one of the three and look at what it does to your picture. Then repeat with one of the other settings and so forth. Eventually you will start to understand each one and finally be able to put all three together so they cooperate with each other.
 
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