I was shooting my niece cheerleading indoors yesterday. I wanted to freeze the action of the cartwheels and other rolls. So I was shooting in Shutter Priority Mode. I would have liked to shoot at 1/1000 but these kids were not moving too fast (like a car) so I was able to drop down to 1/500 and still freeze the action. The lighting conditions were not that great. I was inside a typical high school gym. I set my white balance to Fluorescent took a test shot. The test shot was still to dark. I couldn’t drop the shutter speed down any further for risk or getting blurry images. That’s when I remembered AUTO ISO.
This is a really cool feature your camera may have. This is how it works. You go to the AUTO ISO or ISO SENSITIVITY settings on your camera. You set a maximum ISO that you want your camera to use (in my case it was 3200). Then set your camera to shutter priority and set your shutter speed. As I mentioned earlier I was set to 1/500. Now when you take a test shot, your camera will automatically boost up the ISO to achieve optimal lighting. This worked great for me all day.
There is one downside. The higher the ISO, the more digital noise you are going to see. However, the cameras being produced these days shoot so well in low light that the noise hardly noticeable. However if you still see noise in your pictures, you can try running them through a noise reduction software. I use Topaz Denoise. Is it going to work magic and restore all of your super grainy pictures? NO. But it will work nicely on pictures that have a little noise that you want to clean up.
Have fun!
