Camera Settings
-Learning to Shoot In Manual Mode-
Shutter Speed
Shutter speed is like your eyelids. The shutter blinks in your camera. The number you assign to the shutter speed defines the speed of the “blink”. When you have your shutter speed turned down you are essentially blinking slowly and allowing more light to pass through
ISO
The ISO is a light regulator. Just as mini blinds are in your home. When the blinds are drawn DOWN the light is minimal. When you put them UP you bring in all the light from outside. The reason that we choose blinds is so that we can pull them up or down depending on how much light we want.
This is the function of ISO:
-The lower the ISO number the less light – keep it this way unless you must adjust for a brighter photo.
-The higher the ISO number the more light – however if too high you could introduce noise.
Aperture
Aperture is measured in F-stops on your camera. I remember the F-Stop by comparing it to how your pupil reacts to the lighting situation around it.
A fully dilated pupil is the bodies reaction to less light – a large F-Stop number gives less light.
A small pupil is the bodies reaction to more light – the smaller the F-Stop the more light is provided.
The Q Button
Q stands for quick – this button makes navigating quick
Photo Terms
DSLR
Digital Single reflex camera. SLR’s are film cameras where DSLR’s are digital. Both usually have a camera mount and interchangeable lens. A point and shoot, although sometimes mistakenly called an SLR, is not one. They are just a regular camera.
Shutter Speed
An element of exposure; the duration of time in which light is allowed through your lens. How fast your shutter opens and closes.
Aperture/F-Stop
Aperture, and F-Stop are interchangeable in terms. People use one or the other, or both. But they refer to the same thing. Measurements of the diameter of the aperture, or basically how much the shutter opens to let light in.
Depth Of Field
(DOF) Amount of the foreground and background that is in focus with the subject. Simply put the blur you get behind or in front of the object in focus.
Exposure
The amount of light that enters the lens and strikes the film or sensor. Exposures are broken down into aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. It is a combination of the intensity and duration of light.
ISO
The speed at which the sensor reacts to light.
White Balance
Is the process of removing Unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. Getting the right white balance will help you get your skin tones right out of camera.
SOOC
Straight out of camera – this is the image you get without any adjustments in software.
Focal Points
Picking the objects/subjects that you want to be in focus
Composition
The visual, artistic layout of your image. You can have good or bad composition.
Bokeh
The blur, or the quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas of an image.
Fundamentals of DSLR Photography
One of the key aspects of DSLR photography is exposure.
Exposure: A photographs exposure determines how light or dark an image will appear when its been captured by a camera. To capture the images that you have in mind and that you want to create, you must understand exposure.
What goes into exposure, how do I get the proper exposure?
There are 3 things that go into exposure: Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO. To get the perfect exposure these 3 things are going to move in tandem to one another.
If you change shutter speed, now aperture and ISO are affected. If you change aperture, now ISO and Shutter speed are affected. These are the things that go into exposure that get you the perfect images, not to bright, not to dark. They get you right in the middle and allows you an image you can work with in retouching.
Understanding Your DSLR
What happens when you click the button:
First thing that happens is there is an opening in your lens the whole time, when you click the button, light is allowed to pass through that lens and hit a sensor in the back of the camera – that’s why it’s called DSLR. Digital Single Lens Reflex, which means it has a mirror in there that allows you to see through the lens. What happens when you press the button is the mirror flips up and it reveals a censor, you click the button and light passes through the lens, makes contact with the censor and how long that light hits the censor is what determines your exposure.
Shutter Speed:
The length of time a camera shutter is open to expose light into the camera sensor which is where the image is printed or captured. Shutter speed is always represented as a number. 1/500 – 1/2500 that is the fraction of a second that is allowed for the light to come through the lens and hit the sensor. The sensor is behind the mirror and light passes through the lens. If you leave the shutter open for a second that means your letting a second’s worth of light come through and hit the sensor. If you leave the sensor open for 1/25 of a second that means its instant that light is passing onto the sensor. 1/8000 is quick, 1 second will seem longer compared to 1/8000. You basically have a full second of exposure on an image. That is a big difference and you want to understand what those different ranges will deliver to your final image. The great thing about shutter speed is it serves 2 purposes – one purpose is it will control how much light is allowed to hit your sensor, it can allow your image to look lighter or darker depending on how fast or how slow you manipulate the shutter speed. Second thing it allows you to freeze motion, if you shoot with a faster shutter speed you can freeze motion, however if you want to see some motion in your image a slower shutter speed will allow you to obtain that. For instance, your shooting a friend walking down the street and you want to freeze that motion, you want to be in a shutter range of 1/250 sec – 1/500 sec. You might be able to psychically hand hold the camera and get a good frozen sharp image of somebody walking. If you want to catch a car or somebody running or jogging you need to shoot a little bit faster, that range is probably going to be around 1/1000 – 1/5000. If you want to show a little blur but also keep your subject sharp you might be somewhere in the range of 1/30 – 1/60 gives you a slight motion blur.
Say your taking a picture of a waterfall and you want to make the water look smooth and silky, you might be at ½ a second or a full second. If your taking a picture at night and you want to show a beautiful skyline with stars twinkling and be able to capture sort of lights moving as you drive through highways or intersections and see that light trail your going to want to shoot even slower maybe at 30 second exposure. You can use shutter speed all along the spectrum to capture some really cool and creative photos, it’s about knowing those typical ranges and being able to hone in on that, that allows you to really take control of the camera and the picture that comes out as a result of it.
The other benefit of shutter speed is it allows you to negate the impact of camera shake. The faster you shoot and image the less that becomes a factor. The slower you shoot an image the more likely you will be susceptible to camera shake and seeing that on the final image.
1/125 sec or faster – optimal shutter speed for handheld photography.
Not only can shutter speed help you in controlling your exposure it can also help you with getting rid of camera shake, it can help you freeze motion, it can also help you show motion in an image. It is got a lot of impact on the final image your trying to shoot
Aperture
The size of the opening through which light passes through a photographic lens. How does that have an affect on exposure? The bigger the opening in the lens the more light will pass through and the smaller the opening in the lens, the less light will pass through so it directly impacts whether the image will be dark or light. Aperture is denoted as a number as well and it is called the F-Stop. The F-Stop controls the size of the opening. The smaller the number the bigger the opening and the bigger the number the smaller the opening. If your lens has 2.8 as the maximum Aperture meaning the biggest opening that the lens can have. Thinking about the final image, if you shoot at 2.8 all other things not being considered your going to have a lot of light or a brighter image. If you shoot at F22 in the same lighting conditions, you will have a darker image as a result. Not only can you use aperture to control the exposure of your image you can also use aperture to help with creative aspects of your image.
Depth Of Field
The amount of blur in an image beyond the subject that is in focus.
How blurry the picture ends up being beyond the thing your pointing the camera at. If you focus on the face the rest the rest of the picture will be blurry. The blurrier the image becomes beyond the subject is the shallower the depth of field is. If the image behind that subject is sharp and in focus the depth of field is not very shallow.
If your shooting at 2.8 the maximum aperture or the widest opening, if you take a picture of the person in front of you and focus on the face everything behind them will start to look blurry because at 2.8 with the opening being so wide everything is going to fall out of focus beyond the subject. If you turn the F-Stop to F22 and go really sharp, things behind that person are going to start to look in focus.
How can you use these different aperture values to benefit your photo? If you want to take a really cool portrait of somebody and you want that really cool, crisp sharp look where the face is really in focus but everything is blurred out, which allows you to focus more on a persons emotion, your going to want to shoot with a lower number or higher aperture. Somewhere between 1.2 and 3.2 that is a good range to get a good blur behind your subject and make sure your subjects still in focus. Now if you want to do a landscape or a group photo you might want to shoot with a higher number or what we call a lower aperture. Let’s say a group of 3 or 4 people and you want to make sure all their faces are in focus. Start about 5.6 then work all the way up to 8 or 11 that will guarantee that all faces will be in focus. If you’re wanting to shoot an image in nature and your stepping back trying to capture a big scene you sometimes want to go above F11 and go somewhere from F22, F18 that will ensure you get the most of the scene in focus and very sharp and crisp details. You will not need to go above F11 for a lot of nature scenes. The lower number will get that blur when your taking pictures of your clients up close for portraits, the middle numbers 5.6 -8 will get you good results if your timing to get a group of people in sharp focus and things around F8 and above are going to give you good shots for landscapes.
ISO
Think of ISO as the weapon of last resort. It is one of the things you want to keep as low as possible. ISO is the measurement of sensitivity a cameras image sensor has to light meaning the higher the number the more sensitive, meaning brighter, the lower the number the less sensitive it is to light so the darker the image. The higher the number goes, let’s say it bottoms out at 100 and goes all the way up to 3200. The higher you make that number the more susceptible your final image will be to digital noise, and digital noise is similar to like in the film days of having heavier grain, except unfortunately digital noise does not look so great. Its not black and white, its not monochromatic, its literally these weird colors and grainy texture to your final image. You want to avoid that so that is why shooting a lower number is going to be better. That’s why we call this the weapon of last resort, because if you are in a situation where there’s not enough light and you’ve already maxed out your aperture meaning your shooting at a lower number, a bigger opening in your aperture, your shooting the slowest speed you can shoot on your shutter speed in order to hand hold your camera but not deal with the camera shake then the last thing you can possibly do is effect your ISO. If you have to move your ISO to 1600 for instance because your shooting inside and the lights not that great, you’re going to have a nosier image than if you were shooting outside in bright daylight with an ISO at 100. You want to be aware of those things when your shifting around on the perimeters of your exposure triangle. Try to stick to range of 100-400
Inside = 100 – Outside = 400-800
Balancing The Exposure Triangle
Now you have all 3 points of the exposure triangle. What were trying to do is balance each side of the exposure: Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO to get a well-balanced exposure. Let’s think about the balancing of the triangle in shutter speed and aperture terms. Let’s make this about more light and less light. You can’t have a very slow shutter speed meaning were letting a lot of light in and then have a really big aperture opening because were flooding the camera with light, we must balance those two. On the other side we can’t have a very fast shutter speed meaning were not letting a lot of light in and then a very tiny aperture opening where were not letting any light in either. How do we balance those things?
If you want to shoot a portrait and have that beautiful blur and I shoot with a very wide opening, say 2.8, now I’ve got a big opening and I’m letting a lot of light in. Now how do you balance that against the shutter? By making it faster, cut off some of the amount of time the light is hitting or passing through that opening so that you balance out the exposure. Opposite way – Your shooting a very tight aperture opening and trying to get everything in focus so were not letting a lot of light in through the opening. We need to let more time for light to pass through that opening by shooting with a slower shutter speed.
Now the way that ISO will interact with these is sometimes you’re going to be in a low light situation. For instance, where you have to shoot with a very wide aperture and a somewhat slow shutter speed and that still might not give you what you need in order to capture the image with enough light. You must tweak that ISO up to let more light into the camera. The goal is all 3 things be in balance and in harmony to get the great and perfect exposure.
So how do you know your getting the right exposure? What you want to do is pick up your camera, turn it on and your going to pick something to take a picture of. Look through the viewfinder, find that thing you’re going to take a picture of, and half press the shutter button. What happens is a bar is going to pop up along the bottom of the viewfinder and your going to see a little arrow and it’s going to go left and right depending on what you point your camera and focus on. Now if it goes to the left into the negative territory that means your settings are tuned so that the camera is going to shoot something dark. If the arrow goes to the right of the middle area that means your camera settings are showing its going to be a bright image. What you want to do is play a game where we get the arrow in the middle, so you have a balanced exposure.
If you decide that your aperture is going to stay at 2.8 for a portrait, and the meter is showing you that your too bright, what do you do next? Your going to take your finger off the shutter and your going to use the shutter wheel to make your shutter speed faster. Meaning less light. Now the opposite is if your shooting 2.8 and it is showing you that you don’t have enough light then you’re going to try and slow your shutter speed down. You want to try and make that arrow go from the right to the middle or the left to the middle and your going to do that using the shutter speed because you’ve picked what aperture you want. Now there are some cases where its going to get to slow on the shutter speed where you cannot handle the camera and you’re going to be subject to camera shake. If you have a 2.8 and cant go any wider on your aperture and you’re at say, 1/200 and you cant go any slower with your shutter speed because your worried there’s going to be some motion shake in your picture. The last thing you can do is grab your ISO and you can change that now to get to move the arrow back towards the middle. Were keeping everything in harmony and you can pick what you want to start off with, whether that be aperture or shutter speed and then we manipulate the other factors, ISO being the last one we touch in order to get that arrow from the left or the right back to the center.
Preparing To Shoot
So now that you understand the exposure triangle and the different elements of that, you understand that looking through the viewfinder is where your going to meter and figure out if your too bright or too dark. At the same time, your metering one of the cool things is your also picking your focus point. Every camera is different and has a couple different modes so check out your manual to see what those modes are doing.
If your shooting a person, I like to pick the eye to focus on because that will put the whole person in focus. If your shooting something that’s not a portrait such as a group of people, you’re going to want to pick the middle person or somebody that’s where most of the people are on the same focal plane
-Focal Plane- The distance from the camera at which the sharpest focus is attained.
If your shooting a scene in the street and you have someone running across the street, your going to pick a point on the body. Try to aim for the chest because that is a good midground for them and then your going to focus and take the picture. It gets a little tricky when your shooting a landscape because if you’re out in the wild and you have it on a tripod, your trying to take a picture of a big scene, what do you point it at? Try to point the focus at a point that is about a third of the way into the picture. Pick something that you can focus on and then recompose and shoot that scene. By shooting a third of the way into the image you will be able to capture most of everything you need in a good focal plane which is how your going to have a nice crisp and sharp image.
What format should you shoot your pictures in? If you shoot in RAW, you’ll have a lot of flexibility and versatility with the file afterwards. So, if you shoot something that’s a little to dark or a little to bright you can recover it and make the file usable and it’s still a beautiful image to use. Another great benefit of shooting in RAW is it will allow you to deal with a lot of corrections after the facts. For instance, were going to shoot our camera with our white balance on auto and sometimes the camera is going to be spot on. But sometimes the camera is going to run into a case where the white balance is off, and you can correct that with retouching after.
Shutter Speed
Shutter Priority Mode – TV mode on your camera.
This allows you to choose a specific shutter speed while the camera adjusts the aperture and ISO to ensure correct exposure.
In this mode your going to pick the shutter speed that will best help you either freeze motion if that’s what your trying to do, or just allow the right amount of light to come into the camera for the perfect exposure. One thing I like to do is if someone is running past my lens, I will pan the camera with the motion, that just helps add to the ability for the shutter to freeze the motion.
As your shifting to manual mode, your going to be in control of the three parts of the exposure triangle now. You are going to rely on your camera for the exposure meter so when you look through the lens its going to give you an idea if it is a little too dark or a little too light.
So you have your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO that you need to contend with and what I like to do as a good tip for people beginning in manual mode is I like to decide which of the 3 things are more important to me as I shoot.
Aperture
Aperture Priority mode – AV Mode on camera.
Allows the user to set a specific aperture value while the camera selects a shutter speed and ISO to match it that will result in proper exposure.
Keep in mind that a lower number will give you a very shallow depth of field then the higher number will give you a very sharp less shallow depth of field. Increasing the aperture values in AV mode automatically adjusts shutter speed and ISO to ensure the correct exposure.
What happens when you back up about 15 ft or however far you want to be from your subject, and you shoot the same focus point your depth of field starts to narrow so the distance between your focus point and face, two things you’re trying to separate come together because we backed up a little bit. So, when you back up at F/2.8 you’ll see the face a little more clearly than when you the the face at 5 ft closer. The same pattern emerges when you go all the way up to F/11 except when you start getting into 8 and 11 at 15ft away most of your subject stats to compress into sharpness so it’s a little counter intuitive but you’ll find this out when your practicing this routine. If you’re in your house set up a coffee mug or whatever you want to get. Try shooting something at different aperture values really close up and then go across the room and shoot the same thing with the same aperture values and you will automatically see what I’m talking about.
Shooting In Manual Mode
70% of the time if your shooting things that are not moving start with aperture because that really is going to determine my ability to capture things in focus. So, remember, pick the aperture that you want to be at. If I start at 3.2 and now I need a setting for ISO and Shutter Speed the great thing about this is the camera still, even though its not changing the settings for you it’s doing all the work. So, you’re going to look through, find your item you want to shoot, look at the meter on the inside of the viewfinder and it will help you find those settings. So at 3.2 I need to be at about 1/125 shutter speed if I’m going to shoot at 100 ISO, if it’s a little dark where your at and you want to shoot a little faster so you don’t have to worry about camera shake. Let’s put ISO and 400, at 400that means I can get to a shutter speed of about 1/500 which is a good handheld speed. You won’t need a tripod and can accomplish everything I need to do with that.
ISO
Let’s look into what ISO is and how to use it for the benefit of your photo. To shoot at a faster shutter speed so I can still handhold my camera I’m going to have to change the ISO. ISO is the sensitivity to light. By turning up the ISO I can still capture things at faster shutter speed. I’m still going to leave the aperture all the way open at 2.8, but it gives me a little bit of leeway. Remember the trade off here is if you have a higher ISO then your going to start to introduce noise into the image. At a certain point that might not be something you want to deal with. There might be a little tradeoff of sharpness but if you really want to get the picture inside or in low light and you don’t have any auxiliary light to use, you’re just going to have to deal with it.
The things you want to keep an eye on, if your shooting a person and they’re not close up and you have a high ISO, remember your trading off sharpness and your trading off digital noise. The one thing I always like to keep my eye on is sharpness. On the back of the camera the picture will look awesome because it’s a small image and you wont be able to tell the difference but once you get a full size image on your screen you’ll see it. If your shooting people inside under low light conditions you might have to trade off image quality. There isn’t an ISO priority mode but there is one part of the camera that could really help you sort of dial in your exposure without trying so hard and so you can still stay on auto pilot. Instead of using ISO priority mode which doesn’t exist you can use the auto function on the ISO adjustment tool. On your camera you can select your ISO from 100 all the way up to whatever number is the max or you can turn it on auto and you can just manipulate the other 2 factors, shutter speed and aperture, and then it will select the ISO for you. One thing to keep in mind is that when you are in ISO auto mode it’ll select whatever ISO value it needs to get the picture to be the right exposure. In your menu, consult your guide for your camera, you can check out a way to bracket the ISO so it maxes out the value in which the ISO will scroll to.
A Few Tips
Photograph what you love – It will make it more enjoyable. If you are passionate about nature, people, pets or whatever it may be, start learning by taking pictures of it. This will keep you interested in photography and allow you to overcome learning obstacles without breaking a sweat.
Use the “Rule Of Thirds” for balanced photo’s while framing a shot. Visually break it down into a grid of nine equal rectangles and place your subject on one of the four intersections for a natural look. Its not a hard rule, but a good guideline to follow instead of just placing your subject dead center by default.
Don’t use built-in-flash as a primary light source. Using built-in-flash as a primary light source creates very harsh shadows and an unflattering look. It’s mainly useful as fill flash, like when harsh sunlight is casting dark shadows across your entire subject. Its also helpful in emergencies when there’s almost no light around and you just want to capture an image of something – even then it will create unflattering shadows and highlights on your subject.
Fill the frame. When you leave too much empty space or zoom out too much, it makes your subject a lot smaller relative to the entire picture. This deemphasizes the importance of your subject and can make it confusing to viewers what your subject actually is. Remedy this by moving in closer or zooming in.
Change up your perspective for better results. Most of us see everything from about five and a half feet from the ground, and if your photography is only done at eye level, things can look boring. Experiment with different angles to discover new perspectives.
Learn to use exposure compensation. Sometimes you’ll take photographs that don’t properly expose your subject – they are way too bright, or way to dark. This can be a combination of a few things: which areas of the scene your camera measured for exposure, and how different in brightness the light and dark areas are in your scene.
Use a wider aperture for portraits to make your subject pop. Aim for an aperture size around F-2.8 to F5.6 to make the background behind your subject more blurred out.
Prevent blurry pictures by matching shutter speed to the lens focal length. For example, if your using a 50mm lens you should use shutter speeds of 1/50sec or faster to be able to capture handheld images and keep them sharp. Longer lenses are heavier and more difficult to keep steady so making the shutter speed faster helps avoid camera shake.
Use the “Golden Hour” of light. Lighting is paramount since it dictates the shape, texture, contrast, and shadows in your images. The golden hour is about a one – hour window briefly after sunrise or before sunset. The longer shadows and especially the more diffused light during these periods provide much more flattering light.
Keep both eyes open when looking through the rangefinder. When shooting portraits, your subjects will be able to “connect” with you by seeing one of your eyes. Without this, many subjects can feel a little bit uneasy like your hiding behind the camera.
Learn to use histogram. Most people skip over this but spending just 10 minutes to understand the histogram can make a big difference in your photos. It will help you avoid unusable photos from overexposing bright whites and underexposing dark details in lower light situations.
Make use of leading lines. A photograph with weak composition will leave viewers confused about what they should be focusing on. Making use of lines in a scene can help control where viewers eyes move, especially with strong, obvious lines. Lines that converge create depth and draw the viewer in while curved lines can take you around the frame.
A word before you blur. The sooner you learn to pay attention to a subject’s surroundings while shooting, the better. In general:
- If the subject is in the background, the foreground must contain an element of interest.
- If the subject is in the foreground, the background should not be so distracting to divert the viewers eyes.
Develop your own voice. Always try to put your own spin on your images – something that makes the images uniquely yours. Sure, use someone else for inspiration, but try to work out what it is you are drawn to from that photographer and simply try to incorporate elements into your images.