So, I went out today with a friend and her kids to Dartmoor Zoo.  Never been there before and knowing it was smaller than Paignton Zoo I did wonder if it was going to be a bit of a disappointment.  I couldn’t have been more wrong! Lots a enclosures and some impressive animals including beers, lions, tigers and the reason we went there, wolves (my friend’s son has a husky and is wolf mad). And now onto ISO settings, I was taking faster shutter speed pictures, or at least trying too, as the animals didn’t feel like posing for me.  The day had started wet and cloudy so natural light wasn’t great, so my faster shutter speeds were just giving me under exposed images.  This meant I ended up using slower Shutter speed settings and the knock on effect was blurry animals and long exposure times which wasn’t ideal without a tripod.  Flash wouldn’t have had any effect as the animals were too far away and I didn’t want to startle anything. Next step was to use a smaller F number (larger aperture hole) but still blurry animals.  Unfortunately I had completely forgotten about my ISO settings and bumping the ISO up would have meant less blurry animals, but at least I remembered in the end.  I’m still learning every day and I’m not going to be too hard on myself especially as I got a couple of nice shots of the lion and lioness, which I’ll share on here later.

Just gotta remember that with bad light sometimes ISO changes are the only way to get the non-blurry action shots you’re after and with modern digital SLRs and Bridge cameras upping the ISO doesn’t always lead to grainy pictures.