I was playing around with the Auto ISO on my Nikon D90 on Sunday following a recent tip on D-Town TV (If you haven’t seen this cool video podcast already, you should check it out) and while I was out shooting I accidentally came across a cool side effect of using Auto ISO. If you have Auto ISO turned on and you set your camera to manual, it will let you set any shutter speed and aperture combination and the camera will still give you an automatic exposure only it does so by altering the ISO. What’s more is that it does so by what ever increment it needs and not just whole stops. So you can have ISO 220 or 245 or 515 and not just 100, 200, 320 etc.
Why would you ever need this I hear you ask? Well, consider this. You’re out shooting on the street or whatever. You want to set a narrow aperture to keep everything in focus, or perhaps you want to set a wide aperture so only the selected area is in focus. Normally you’d set aperture priority and you’re on your way. But what if you also want to make sure your shot isn’t blurred. Well, with this trick you can set your Shutter speed as well. Of course you can do all this in Aperture Priority mode or manual anyway but if you’re in a fast moving situation with changing light and you want to focus on framing and getting the shot then this trick works a treat. And exposure compensation still works as normal too, so you can still use that to offset what the camera says. I know some purists will balk at the idea and I certainly wouldn’t use it in every situation, but it does work and it works pretty well. You buy these modern cameras with all this complicated processing power and technology under the hood, so why not use it once in a while. After all, at the end of the day it’s te result that matters.
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