Change the ISO on a Nikon D3300

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Video: Change the ISO on a Nikon D3300

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Hello and welcome to VisiHow.com. This is going to be a tutorial on how to change our ISO and what the ISO is. I'm going to be using a Nikon D3300 for this, but it doesn't matter what make or model your camera is, because the ISO settings are really universal.

1. 1
   First of all, go ahead and make sure the camera is on

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   Switch to the manual mode, because we can't do this in automatic.

   

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2. 2
   Once we have the camera on, look at the screen and it will give us three dials which we can change

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   The one on the left is the shutter speed, which we are not going to be talking about today, along with the F-stop. We are going to be talking about the ISO and what that does. Right now, it is set to 100 ISO. What ISO does is it decides how sensitive our camera is to light. The lower this number is, the less sensitive the camera is to light. However, the lower ISO is, the higher quality the image is, and there is less blurriness in the photo. When we have a higher ISO like 6400 or even 12800, it can get really fuzzy and blurry. However, it will be very bright, so it will be helpful in low-light situations. Try to keep the ISO as low as possible without getting too dark an image.

   

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3. 3
   Let's go ahead and change the ISO

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   Press the "I" button and use the arrow pad to find where the ISO is, and once we get there, press "OK.

   

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4. 4
   Here, we can see a few settings

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   100 ISO would be optimal in outdoor bright conditions like a waterfall, and if we're to go up to 1600, that would be good for slightly darker indoor shots. 12800 ISO, which we can see by the picture, is for space and outdoor night shots, or if we wanted to do some photography of the stars.

   

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5. 5
   Let's see what 12800 ISO would look like, so select that, and we're going to go into live view

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6. 6
   It is very bright compared to what we have our settings at

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   We have our settings at a 22 F-stop, which would normally be quite dark. Because we have the ISO set up so high, it is slightly brighter than normal.

   

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7. 7
   Let's take a picture and zoom in a little to see what it looks like

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   Let's look at the headphone jack. It is extremely blurry and fuzzy. We can barely see the detail in that.

   

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8. 8
   Let's go back and choose a lower ISO

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   Let's say 1600.

   

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9. 9
   We're going to make the F-stop a bit higher so that more light can get into the sensor

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10. 10
    Now, let's go to live view

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    It would be a little bit darker of an image, but because we changed the F-stop, it's a little bit brighter. Take the same photo.

    

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11. 11
    Let's zoom into the same place

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    Already we can see there's a lot less distortion. We can see the headphones a lot better. We can zoom in all the way to the headphones, and we can still see pretty good.

    

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12. 12
    Let's go back out of live view mode, bring the ISO down all the way to 200 and make the F-stop a bit bigger again

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    We're going to make the shutter speed a bit longer.

    

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13. 13
    Let's take a photo, and the photo is getting darker

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    Because we made the shutter speed longer and the F-stop higher, it's not that much darker. So let's look at the image that we just took. Here, there is a lot less blurriness. We can see the headphones clearly and without too much distortion all the way from back here where the camera is. So that is what ISO is and how we can change it on a DSLR camera.

    

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14. 14
    Thank you for watching VisiHow.com

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    If you have any questions or comments about this video, please leave them in the comments below. Please check out my profile for tutorials like this and more, and I will see you guys later. Bye.

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Need some insight on choosing Auto ISO settings in Manual mode, I got few awesome shots (M Mode)... but I set shutter to 1/125 as minimum shutter speed. Is this OK., I can reduce it still? (Shutter speed)?

Need some insight on choosing Auto ISO settings in Manual mode, I got few awesome shots (M Mode)... but I set shutter to 1/125 as minimum shutter speed. Is this OK., I can reduce it still? (Shutter speed)?

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