Have you ever wondered, “what does ISO stand for in photography?” If you’re reading this article, we’ll bet you have! And Peerspace is here to provide all the answers you need on the subject. Just as we’re the largest online provider of hourly venue rentals, so we are happy to fill you in on crucial aspects of the art of photography. In fact, we’ll share photos from real Peerspace venues that you can book today to enhance your ISO skills and more. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves since you need to understand ISO before experimenting with it.

In photography, there are three basic elements that all work in tandem to control exposure. Shutter speed, f/stop, and ISO. That last one can be a little tricky to wrap your head around if you’re just starting out in photography or have only used automatic digital cameras in the past. So let’s get to the bottom of this key element of photography and understand once and for all: what does ISO stand for?

The name

In short, ISO is the term used to indicate “film speed” in traditional photography. But if you’ve ever done a quick Google search of the term, you may have been frustrated if you wanted to know what it literally stands for. For that, we need a quick lesson in international diplomacy and nerds.

ISO stands for International Organization of Standards. But wait, wouldn’t that be IOS? That’s the diplomacy part. Because it’s a global organization, it’d have a different acronym in different languages. So rather than going by many names, they settled on ISO for everyone to use. It’s even on their logo.

And what exactly does any of that have to do with photography? Well, that’s the nerd part. See, nerds who like to begin their contribution to dinner party conversations with the phrase “well technically…” got together and developed standards to describe photographic film’s sensitivity to light.

The practical

Now that we’ve got the history out of the way, we can look at what ISO means for the practical photographer. Wistia describes it succinctly as follows: “the lower the ISO, the darker your image will be; the higher the ISO, the brighter your image will be”. To make that a bit more concrete, let’s imagine an example.

Let’s say you want to experiment with astrophotography. Nothing fancy, no special telescope attachments, just a tripod, a camera, and a clear dark sky. To take such a picture, it’s best to think about your own eyes. When you go stargazing, it takes your eyes a bit to adjust, and as the first few minutes pass by, you can gradually see more stars. Why? Your pupils are dilating, letting in more light.

That’s an easy analogy to your camera’s aperture, the adjustable opening that controls the amount of light that comes in. Combined with shutter speed, the amount of time the aperture is open, you have now controlled the total amount of light coming in. That’s where ISO comes in.

According to Astro Backyard, you’ll want an ISO of anywhere from 400 all the way to 1600 for night photography. That’s because you want a high sensitivity to the very limited amounts of light coming in.

ISO can very simply be described as a film’s sensitivity to light. A low ISO like 100 is appropriate for bright daylight photos. Since you have plenty of light to work with in daylight settings, you will pair that with a short amount of time to have the aperture open.

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