Over my many years in photography, I have met and talked with so many other people who either enjoy taking photos professionally or as a hobby. One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is: what is the highest amount of ISO I am willing to go when taking photographs? Well, in short, as high as I need to. I &nd that many people get hung up on ISO; they are afraid of grainy images and will miss shots entirely because of it.
When you take photographs manually as I do, you have three settings to factor in when creating an image: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. The first setting I factor in is aperture, then ISO. If I need my shutter to be quicker so that my subject isn’t blurry, I will crank the ISO up as high as I need to get to the shutter speed where I need it. When you change the ISO on a digital camera, you’re rendering the sensor more or less sensitive to light. A quick tip I use for finding shutter speed in most situations (excluding night photography) is your shutter speed has to be faster than your focal length. This will keep your images from blurring. For example, if I shot at 400 mm’s, my shutter speed would have to be 1/500 of a second to keep everything sharp.
My best advice for those wanting to get into landscape photography or just photography, in general, is not to be afraid of ISO. Do not miss the shot because you have heard that having grain or high ISO in your image is terrible. If you properly expose your image, then the grain is barely noticeable, and when you take it in for post-processing, you can adjust the luminance and make it not so prominent. Once I started to not worry about my ISO, I began to take pictures I never would usually take, and my portfolio is better for it.