So your question is very good. I use the 5D Mark 2 therefore using a high ISO is not a problem at all. As a matter of fact, even when shooting at ISO 1600 I have to add grain in post if I am going for that grainy look ! It’s amazing.

Looking at the shot of the model standing with the orange sunset behind her I lost the ambient light and raised my ISO to 400 but I still had to shoot at 1/5 of a second which obviously is very slow. I asked the model to find her pose and then not move at all until I fired. Why didn’t I shoot at let’s say ISO 1600 thus allowing me to shoot at a faster shutter speed ? There are two reasons.

1. The background of the city buildings was basically all black except for the street lights, car lights and the lights in the buildings. So with so much black in your frame, using a high ISO IS going to give you too much digital noise/ grain.

2. I also wanted to capture that beautiful orange sunset color and the city lights. Well in order to capture that orange sunset and also capture the city lights you need to use a high aperture (small) and a slow shutter speed.

So my settings were ISO 400, Shutter speed 1/5th and aperture of f /8 . I used f/8 because I wanted the background to pop but not too much. At the same time I didn’t want to totally blur out the background. So I decided f/8 was a good split.

Have you noticed I haven’t even mentioned the clothes ? If you want to be a working photographer you MUST MUST realize that it’s about the clothes ! The shirts were also dark. So I didn’t want so much digital noise that would make the dark shirts look like crap therefore not being usable. So all you potential clients out there and of course photographers listen up. There are many many many circumstances a photographer must consider before that shutter is even touched. It’s not easy but if you do your homework and learn your fundamentals you will succeed.

I hope that answered your question Jeff. If need more please don’t hesitate to ask.

These are things I teach in my photography workshops as well as many other aspects of photography.

another question. I was watching the video and thinking if I was doing this job, what would the technical challenges be?

One question I had was when the shoot progressed and the ambient light was falling, giving a fantastic city dusk/night scene, you had a choice of dragging the shutter to hold the ambient, or up the iso so as to keep a higher shutter speed with the sacrifice of shooting at the higher iso.

Would love to hear your thoughts and approach to this.

Thanks,

Jeff

The speedotron’s looked like that had a comparable price to the AB series heads.

anyway-

like this kind of videocast …