Understanding these 3 settings are KEY to better photography!
Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO. The three pillars of photography.
I still remember the day I bought my first DSLR camera kit, unboxed it, inserted the battery and SD card, attached the lens, and shot my first photo. The crisp image that displayed on the small LCD screen afterwards was magical. I thought that was it, I’d cracked photography, and all it took was outlaying a few hundred dollars on a camera that wasn’t my iphone. In the week that followed my camera seemed to hold up to all expectations I had for my first DSLR . That was until I tried to shoot my first sunrise, and it all started to come undone. My camera that had previously seamlessly adapted to my creative backyard shots or candid family portraits perfectly suddenly started to fault. It was 5:30am, just after first light and my handheld shots of before sunrise at the beach were now all coming out either blurry or underexposed, and thus ended my honeymoon period with automatic mode shooting.
There are three settings in the camera that will effect the the exposure of your photos. Shutter speed, aperture (technically this one is in the lens), and ISO. In this blog, i’ll break each down for you, how they effect exposure, how each one effects your photography artistically, and how the work together. Let’s break them down quickly first.
Shutter speed: This is how long your shutter is open for, exposing your sensor to the light.
Aperture: The is how large or small the hole in the lens is, controlling the amount of light that can get through.
ISO: The ISO refers to the “sensitivity” of the sensor. (I have put sensitivity in inverted commas as purists of photography will debate the technicalities of ISO all day long, however if you are still reading this blog, i’m guessing you, just like me years ago, just want to understand the basics of photography.)
Now we’ve got the basics, let’s break them down in a bit more detail and how else they can effect your photo with some examples.
Shutter speed:
Shutter speed is measured in time, in a DSLR camera it can usually range from around 1/4000 of a second to 30 seconds (and longer with BULB mode), and it is how long your shutter is “open” for exposing your sensor to the light. The longer it is open for, the more light that gets in. If your shutter is open for 1/40 of a second, it will be brighter than if you had your shutter only open for 1/200 of a second, this is because the 1/40 is longer period of time than 1/200 and therefore it will let more light in.
As well as controlling the exposure in an image, shutter speed can give you some of the greatest effects in photography. Long exposure photography, motion blur, fast shutter photography to name a few. Some examples of these are below
If you go too slow with your shutter speed whilst holding the camera in your hands, your photo will become blurry as you won’t be steady enough. As a rule of thumb, your shutter speed when shooting hand held should be the opposite of the focal length of the lens. For example, if you’re shooting on a 50mm lens, 1/50 is the slowest you should go, if you’re shooting on a 200mm lens, 1/200 is the slowest you should go. This is because the longer the focal length the less forgiving towards shake and movement they are.
Slow Shutter Photography by Lachlan Gowen (1/3 second)
High Speed Photography by KOBU Agency (1/6400 second)
Aperture:
Aperture is measured in numbers called f stops, typically between f1.2 and f22 depending on your lens, and it is essentially the size of the hole in the lens that lets light through. The larger the hole the more light that can get through, which is a pretty simple concept, so to make things slightly trickier for you, the photography gods have made it so that the smaller the number, the larger the hole. Once you’ve got your head around that, you’ve got it covered. It does however change some other elements as well as exposure to your photos.
The main other effect aperture has on your photo is depth of field. This is how much of the shot is in focus. A low f stop say f1.4 (a larger hole in the lens) will have a small depth of field, and a large f stop say f16 will have a big depth of field (more of the shot in focus). This concept might be easier to visualise rather than read about so i’ve attached some examples below.
f3.2 less in focus
f8 more in focus
ISO: ISO is the final piece to the puzzle, and usually the last one to adjust when shooting in manual mode. ISO can be thought of as the “sensitivity” of the sensor (although technically it’s more of a gain on the sensor thus causing a heavy noise effect when set too high). Usually ranging from ISO 50 to ISO 128 000 on DSLR cameras, the higher the number, the more exposed the image. HOWEVER, as you go up in ISO, your image starts to get grain on it, known as noise. This noise can distort or give an unwanted effect to your image, and for this reason it is the last of the trio that I will update depending on my light environment.
And with that, my second blog post is done,
Until next time,
(Insert what will eventually become my token sign off here)
