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Your ISO
Understanding it and what it does.
The ISO setting of a camera is basically the image sensor's 'sensitivity'. The higher the ISO (100, 200,400 etc..) the more sensitive the image sensor will be, for lower light conditions.
So, in low light conditions, and if you are like me and don't like using your flash, and especially not your on camera flash, then you should bump up your ISO on your camera and it should then keep your shutter quick enough to shoot a sharp shot under poor lighting, however, a warning, the higher the ISO on a camera (especially in cheaper lower end cameras) the more 'Noise' you will get in your shots.
Noise is the grainy effect that you might have seen before, if you get your camera, turn off the flash and shoot in the dark like at a party, the camera if on 'auto ISO' will crank it up as high as it can. The reason for this noise is that like amplifiers work in music, your camera sends electricity through the image sensor to 'Amplify' the light received by the sensor, and the more electricity sent through the sensor, like turning up the gain on an amplifier, the more 'distortion' you will receive.
However, don't take my word for it on the noise issue, if you have a decent DSLR camera, with a good sensor, then you can get away with shooting at ISO up to about 400 without getting any noise, BUT, be warned, you will have to get the exposure pretty much spot on, because the minute you take the photograph into a post processing program and turn up the levels to brighten the image, noise will start to appear in shadows etc.
Here is an example of what noise looks like when shot under a high ISO.
Here is an example of that image when the ISO is low and no noise is present (what you should be aiming for, but don't forget, the better the camera, the higher the ISO you can go without noise being a huge problem.)
