Tag: ISO

Peak Wildlife Park

Red squirrel
A red squirrel at Peak Wildlife Park. 1/1000th at f8, ISO 1600.

I had a very enjoyable visit to Peak Wildlife Park near Leek in Staffordshire today (24th September 2025). I had visited once before, about ten months ago and enjoyed it so much I knew I wanted to go back.

On that visit last year I had my first ever sighting of red squirrels. Ok, so they were in captivity but it was still a big thing for me. I’m 57 years old and despite lots of visits to areas of the UK where red squirrels can be seen in the wild, I hadn’t ever seen one until November 2024.

I managed to get one reasonable photo of a red squirrel during today’s visit, they were a bit less visible than during my last visit.

Before I go on to write much about my photography today, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed Peak Wildlife Park. I’m not really a big fan of zoos. I don’t like seeing animals in cages. I know that conditions in many zoos have improved dramatically since my childhood and that many zoos do lots of good work to develop breeding programmes for endangered species etc. But still, I don’t like to see animals in cages. However, at Peak Wildlife Park the animals all seemed to be very well cared for. Additionally, I like the fact that the place is not too big. It’s easy to get around and see everything during one visit, something that is not so easy at larger zoos.

Red Panda
A red panda at Peak Wildlife Park. 1/1000th at f5.6, ISO 3200

I think that during previous visits to zoos and ‘wildlife parks’ I had often suffered from blurring caused by subject movement due to not having a high enough shutter speed. And the reason my shutter speed was too low was out of fear of using higher ISO. I deliberately went out today telling myself not to worry too much about ISO. As a result I was generally using a shutter speed of 1/1000th, sometimes 1/500th and I didn’t get any motion blur. I was using auto ISO and I have my camera set up with 3 different auto ISO brackets to cater for different lighting levels. All of them have the camera’s native ISO 125 as the lower limit and then I have ISO 800, ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 as the upper limits. I made use of all three settings as lighting conditions changed today.

Yes, there was some visible noise when viewing at 100% on my laptop, but noise reduction in post processing software has improved greatly, and does noise / grain really matter so very much anyway? Have I become too used to that ‘clean’ look of a digital photograph? Maybe it’s too clean?

I’ve been trying to worry less about high ISO during my recent gig photography too. Modern sensors, even APS-C and smaller, are so much better than they used to be. Plus, I think I’d rather see a bit of noise than unwanted motion blur.

I only used one lens today, my 100-400mm which offers a field of view roughly the same as a 150-600mm lens would with a 35mm sensor.

Polar Bear.
A polar bear at Peak Wildlife Park. 1/1000th at f8, ISO 800

Rick With A Silent P

Rick and Warren.
Rick and Warren. Fujifilm X-Pro2, 90mm f2. 1/125 at f2, ISO 6400.

I’m very aware that it has been a couple of months since I posted anything here. Yes, it has been a busy couple of months and thankfully some of that has been photography busy.

This photo of Rick and Warren was taken during the interval at a charity gig I recently attended at The Donkey on Welford Road, Leicester. I was there to support the good cause of the night and also to support my friends on stage : Bellatones.

I still have loads of photos to work my way through from that night which was over a week ago now but this one stood out from the pack for me when I was browsing through to see what I had captured that night.

The vast majority of my photos were of the musicians on stage, that was what I had intended to shoot after all. But at the interval I got chatting outside with Warren (the landlord at The Donkey) and Rick and his good lady, Caroline. It was Caroline who told me that it was “Rick with a silent P” so I do hope he doesn’t mind me using that as the title of this post.

We had a bit of friendly banter during which time Rick, Warren and Caroline got talking about my photography and I snapped one of Rick and Warren together at their request.

It can often be tricky to judge the technical qualities of a photo from the tiny screen on the back of a camera but this one looked pretty good and after showing it to the subjects I ended up being persuaded to take quite a few more of Rick, Warren, Caroline and various of their friends.

It was dark out there.

I had been shooting the acts on stage at ISO 3200 but for these shots I was nabbing outside the venue I had to crank it up a notch to ISO 6400. I’ve always been wary of shooting at high ISO with any camera I’ve owned but I tend to think that it’s better to get something that may have some noise but is free of camera shake so these days I tend to just go with the flow and pump up that ISO as necessary.

And I was not disappointed.

Shot at 1/125, f2 on the X-Pro2 with the excellent Fujinon 90mm lens at ISO 6400. I was even able to focus using auto-focus without any trouble. The only lighting was provided by a string of light bulbs set along the top of the wall about 10 to 15 feet to my left as I shot.

Would this photo have been any better if I’d used my so called “full frame” EOS-6D? I doubt it. I don’t like the term “full frame”. If you mean 35mm sensor then say 35mm sensor. “Full frame” is meaningless – what is full? 2.25 inch square is bigger than a 35mm frame size so how can 35mm be “full”? How about 4×5 inch sheet film? How about 8×10 inch? That makes 135 film (35mm) look tiny. Where do you stop? (I tend to agree with Zak Arias’ point of view on this as expressed wonderfully here).

The best camera is the one you have with you – whether it has a 35mm sensor, an APS-C sensor, Micro Four Thirds or a phone’s camera. You just have to get out there and shoot with it.

Auto ISO

Auto ISO settings
Auto ISO settings on the X-Pro2.

Dear Fujifilm,

The usefulness of having an “Auto ISO” setting became very clear to me during one of my visits to Rome several years ago now. I was shooting only with my X100 because I wanted to liberate myself from lugging loads of camera equipment around a hot (by my native British standards) city in July.

I loved the way that I could be outside in the bright sunshine of a piazza one moment and then step into the darkened interior of one of The Eternal City’s many beautiful churches and the X100 would automatically up the ISO as needed. Head back outside again and the ISO was automatically reduced appropriately. Wonderful. Thank you. I could carry on shooting without missing a beat in radically different lighting scenarios.

What really helped this to work so well was that the X100 had a prime 35mm equivalent lens. I could set the minimum shutter speed the camera would permit before it increased the ISO for me to something that fitted the old formula for shooting to reduce the chance of camera shake – ie 1 / <focal length>, so maybe with the X100 1/40.

Applying this to shooting with my X-Pro2 is a bit more… painful. Why? Because I have a bunch of different lenses all with different focal lengths. 18mm, 35mm, 90mm, 55-200mm. If I’m using the 18mm lens I might set the auto ISO to 1/30, switch to the 90mm and now it needs to be maybe 1/125 or 1/160. Pop on the 55-200mm and… well, you get the picture. Ok, on the X-Pro2 you give me 3 different Auto ISO settings I can select, which is great – but that only allows for three different lenses assuming I wanted to use all three settings in this way.

Fujifilm, when I pop a Fujinon lens onto my X-Pro2 surely the camera knows which lens it has attached? I know it does because the optical viewfinder does all kinds of clever things to adjust the framing lines according to my focal length.

So… How about giving us the option to have an Auto ISO setting of “FL” – which would set the minimum shutter speed to something fitting the old rule of thumb 1 / <focal length>? You have the communication between camera body and lens to be able to work this out for me, so how about it?

And on the zoom lenses you could set that 1 / <focal length> minimum shutter speed intelligently as I zoom in and out, yes?

I’m going to overlook that the lens might have OIS which would change the formula considerably. Yes, your image stabilisation really is very good but for the purposes of this suggestion I’m willing to ignore it.

Sure, keep all the fixed shutter speeds there too, I might want to use one of those if I have a stabilised lens attached or I have some other requirement.

Would this really be too difficult to implement?

And how about your other interchangeable lens cameras?

I’m thinking this is such an obvious thing that surely people must have asked for it before so I’m guessing it actually must be too difficult to implement?

By the way, loving your cameras! The last time I shot with a Canon body was well over a year ago now.

 

Kind Regards,

Chris