How Photos are Made: Three Fundamental Camera Settings You Should Know
The Art, Science, and Technicalities of a Photograph (Part 1)
If you ask any photographer – beginner or experienced – what the trickiest aspect of photography is, I’m willing to bet that they’ll say that it is nailing exposure.
Which is no surprise, as there are a lot of moving parts to exposure.
There’s the actual elements of exposure themselves – shutter speed, aperture, and ISO – and remembering what each one does and how it affects your images. And then there’s understanding how to manipulate those setting to nail a well-exposed image.
So, it’s a bit of an art and science to know exactly how to balance all three to get a shot with perfect brightness and colors.
Manipulating Light
As you probably know, a photograph is made by capturing light. To be more exact, how you control the light makes the photograph.
With your camera, the light you let in is registered by a light-sensitive surface – in digital photography, it’s a sensor; in film photography, it’s the film. But, you need the right amount of light. To achieve that, you need to control how sensitive the sensor is and how much light is going to hit the surface.
A well-exposed picture balances light and dark areas without being overexposed or underexposed.
The Exposure Triangle
Shutter speed, aperture, and ISO – also known as the exposure triangle – control the brightness of your photo, but each in its own specific way. In other words, each brings its own “side effects” to an image.
“The quantity and intensity of light coupled with the amount of time that light is allowed to enter makes or break a great photograph” – Ashwin J.
Shutter speed controls the duration of light that hits your camera's sensor. The longer the shutter speed, the more light is let in. Shutter speed also controls the appearance of motion.
Aperture controls the amount of light that hits your camera's sensor. The larger the aperture size, the more light allowed in. Aperture also controls depth of field.
ISO controls the sensitivity of the camera’s sensor to light. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive the camera sensor is. ISO also controls the appearance of digital noise.
Shutter speed, ISO and aperture don’t work independently of each other – you combine all three to get an image correctly exposed to the best amount of light. An analogy of coffee and milk helped Ashwin understand this:
“Think of light as milk in your morning coffee, aperture as the size of the opening in your milk jug, shutter speed as the time for which you allow milk to flow into your coffee, and ISO as the strength of the black coffee in your mug.
The bigger the opening of your milk jug, the more milk flows out of it (aperture).
The more time you allow milk to flow, the more milk flows out of it (shutter speed).
If you couldn’t control the flow of milk and wanted your coffee darker, you’d make your concoction itself stronger (a low ISO sensitivity setting).”
So, if you change one side of the triangle, the other two sides will be affected.
If this happens, you simply change the other two sides of the triangle to compensate and get the right exposure.
Keep in mind that the exposure triangle is not a set of fussy rules – “shutter speed MUST be this, and ISO MUST be that", etc. You are the artist, you get to manipulate the exposure triangle to achieve different looks and express your ideas in your photos.
Begin the Journey
Technology has come very far and nowadays most modern cameras take care of the exposure triangle, as well as other camera settings, just fine on their own.
However, that doesn’t mean that you have to leave your camera settings in the hands of the device. It’s time to leave the safety net of automatic mode make that jump into manual mode.
In photography, the technical and the creative go hand in hand.
Every technical choice is really an artistic choice in disguise. These settings are worth learning. Your understanding of photography will improve tenfold when you understand how camera settings work.
So, the continuation of this series will go cover the most important camera settings: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Then, we will take a look at how to structure photographs and define the “hero” using composition. This is how photos are made.
https://shotkit.com/camera-settings/
https://shotkit.com/exposure-triangle/
https://www.photographytalk.com/beginner-photography-tips/aperture-shutter-speed-and-iso-the-exposure-triangle
https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/the-3-most-important-camera-settings-for-beginners-2/
https://photographylife.com/what-is-photography#the-three-fundamental-camera-settings-you-should-know
https://digital-photography-school.com/shutter-speed/
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/discover/shutter-speed.html