15 Indoor Photography Tips for Stunning Results (2022)
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Loading... - Jomo Ngigi
- 28 Sep 2022
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While the outdoors can be a dream, indoor photography can be the bane of any photographer’s existence. But it doesn’t have to be!
Although your camera’s sensor doesn’t see as well as your eyes, there are some tips, tricks, and workarounds for this limitation. So grab your camera, head inside, and read our 15 indoor photography tips to get you going!
1. Use a Higher ISO for Beautiful Exposures
Most photographers refer to ISO as the camera sensor’s sensitivity to light. While this isn’t exactly right, it is a useful way to think for the purposes of indoor photography.
If you’ve taken a photograph indoors at the base ISO of 100, you’ll likely find that the image is rather dark. The quickest and easiest remedy is to increase the ISO, which then increases the brightness of your photograph tremendously!
Unfortunately, using a high ISO does come with a catch. Since the ISO is actually increasing the brightness of the recorded pixel, sometimes it increases this too much, and you start to see specks in your photograph: dreaded noise! The goal is to keep noise to a minimum while still maintaining a proper exposure, so don’t push your ISO too high.
For indoor photographs of a room with just a lamp illuminating the area, ISO values above 3600 will likely be needed. For a room with window light, you can keep your ISO lower (around 300 or 400). Event photographers often keep their ISO set between 1000 and 8000.
Bonus tip: How high you can push your ISO depends on the type of camera you use.
Full frame cameras let you shoot at much higher ISO numbers than crop-sensor/APS-C cameras. This is because the full-frame sensor has a bigger surface area for the light to hit, therefore making the most of the light you have available! When deciding between cameras, compare images taken at the same high ISO to determine which camera has less noise.
2. Wide Aperture Lenses Can Save the Day
In order to keep your ISO numbers low and avoid as much noise as possible, you’ll need to adjust your aperture and shutter speed.
The aperture is a hole in the lens that controls how much light does (or doesn’t) hit your sensor.
For indoor photography, due to the general lack of light, you’re going to want a lens that has a wide aperture – ideally f/2.8 or wider, though f/1.2 is a real beauty for indoor photography and is the widest aperture you can get with an autofocus lens!
Aside from letting in light, the aperture has a secondary purpose: depth of field. Since you’re playing with wide apertures in order to let in as much light as possible, your depth of field will be shallow. This is great for indoor photography because a shallow depth of field allows the viewer’s focus to fall solely on the subject; the rest of the background just blurs away and becomes the atmosphere. Read More…
