Image Stabilization - What It Is And How To Use It

Example of image stabilization in low light

In my last post I discussed the use of used high quality lenses on a more modern camera body to get the best bang for your buck in terms of image quality. This is because there is an incredible amount of perfectly good older lenses on sale on Amazon, Ebay, KEH, etc. that have plenty of life left in them and can produce images that are visually stunning and sharp. This is true of almost all of the major camera brands.

I also mentioned in my last post that after doing much research I chose to buy Sony A-mount camera bodies and use older Minolta A-mount lenses that still have auto-focus capabilities. There are several vintage Minolta A-mount lenses that are highly regarded such as the 50mm f1.4 and f1.7 versions, the 70-210mm f4 beer can lens, the 100-300mm f4.5 - 5.6 APO lens, as well as several others. Any of these can be bought for a small fraction of the cost of a similar new manufacturer's lens. This enables those with small photo equipment budgets to get a much better camera and lens combination for the money, and it lets those with more money to spend be able to afford better quality peripheral equipment like tripods, flashes, camera bags, etc.

So why did I choose the Sony/Minolta combination? One major reason held sway when all factors were considered - image stabilization. So what is image stabilization? Well, it can go by several names - vibration reduction, SteadyShot, O.I.S, VC, and so on. But all of these titles refer to a process that helps make up for camera shake in low-light situations. We all know that when we hand-hold a camera using slow shutter speeds, the possibility of blurred photos is very high since we introduce movement into the photo as we hold the camera less than absolutely still. And this problem becomes far more pronounced as the focal length of the lens increases to telephoto and super-telephoto.

To counteract this, the general rule of thumb has been that you don't want to use a shutter speed that is slower than the focal length of the lens on your camera. For instance, if you are shooting with a 300mm lens, use no slower than 1/300th second shutter speed if you plan on hand-holding the camera. Of course, if you have the camera on a tripod, go as slow as you wish and if the subject is still, the photo will still be sharp. But how to deal with low light situations that require slow shutter speeds but are inconvenient for using a tripod?

For this situation, the camera and lens manufacturers came up with technology that automatically adjusts for the movement caused by hand-holding a camera, at least to some extent. In fact, image stabilization technology can allow the average person to gain 3 - 4 extra stops of exposure through slower shutter speeds and still come up with reasonably sharp photos. This means that instead of using 1/300th second with that 300mm lens, you may be able to use 1/30th second instead and still get a sharp shot. Pretty good, huh?

Once the technology became available, most manufacturers began to make lenses that had this feature built into them since it allowed them to sell those lenses for a considerable amount more than lenses without image stabilization. When this feature is built into the lens, a floating lens element is electronically controlled and shifted in the opposite direction of any camera shake recorded by the camera. Since the manufacturers can sell a lot more lenses than they can camera bodies, this made excellent financial sense for them.

However, Sony was smart when they first started making camera bodies to compete with Canon and Nikon, but didn't really have much of a line of lenses to appeal to photo enthusiasts. They chose to put image stabilization into the bodies of their cameras instead of each lens. This works by physically shifting the image sensor in the camera body to compensate for the movements introduced by hand-holding the camera.

What this accomplished is that it immediately made all of those vintage Minolta lenses without image stabilization attractive to prospective enthusiast buyers because if you buy the Canon or Nikon brand of cameras the image stabilization has to be built into each lens and not the camera body. But because of building image stabilization into the camera body itself, Sony could sell modern camera bodies right away that could utilize all of those wonderful Minolta auto-focus lenses that were already floating around on the used market.

When I realized all of this from my research into older lenses, I chose to buy the Sony A-mount brand of camera bodies to get the most for my photo equipment dollar. None of this is to say that Canon and Nikon are inferior in any way to Sony cameras. In my case, this was strictly a cost/reward decision. Even if you do not agree with my choice, this is good information to know and understand.