The Joys of Image Stabilization
By Patty Hankins and Bill Lawrence

During our recent trip to Alaska, we spent much of our time shooting pictures off of a small ship.  This means that we were taking photos from a moving platform that also had a vibration from the engines strong enough that you could feel – this is not a good situation for shooting from a tripod or monopod, so most of the time we were shooting hand-held.

Shooting hand-held can be a problem, particularly in low light or when using a longer telephoto lens.  This really made us appreciate having image-stabilized lenses with us.  We’ve seen image stabilization under the names image stabilization (IS, Canon), vibration reduction (VR, Nikon), and steady shot (Sony) – and we’re sure there are other names, although for this article we’ll call it IS because it’s an easy abbreviation for us to use.  In Nikon and Canon single lens reflex cameras, the manufacturer makes lenses with IS systems installed, which work on both the digital and film SLRs.  Pentax is now manufacturing a digital SLR where the digital sensor has the IS system – meaning that you get the benefit of  IS with any lens you use.  A number of consumer digicams are now coming with IS, although you want to look for optical IS rather than digital (although apparently digital stabilization is helpful for movies, we’ve never used it).

Whatever the manufacturer calls it, optical IS essentially senses camera shake, and compensates by moving the optics of the lens or the digital sensor, depending on the camera system to reduce the movement while the shutter is open.  Effectively, this gives you the ability to reduce the shutter speed by 1-3 stops, and still have a sharp photo; so assuming it does two stops, if you could normally take a sharp photo at 1/60 of a second, you would now be able to at 1/15 of a second.  During our trip, Bill was using a Canon 20D with a 100-400 lens with a 1.4 extender (at full zoom, the 35 mm equivalent would be almost a 900mm lens) hand-held when shooting from the ship.  We even used it on our landscape photos when we were shooting from the ship.  Check out the otter, puffin, whale, and seal photos from our Alaska trip (check out the top photo at http://www.hankinslawrenceimages.com/Alaska/HyderAlaska.html for example)– all of them were taken hand-held with an IS lens.

There are a couple of things IS won’t do for you.  While it steadies the camera, it does not steady the subject.  So, if you are photographing something moving (and don’t want motion artifact in the photo), you have to use a faster shutter speed – IS won’t do anything.  Also, if you are panning (purposefully moving the camera during a shot), you have to turn off the IS or a mode made for panning, otherwise it will fight you (Patty can tell you from experience).  However, we’ve found IS to be very helpful.  If you’re looking for a new lens or a new digicam – you may want to look for IS