Where photography begins: basic settings

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Just as buying a scalpel won't make you a competent surgeon, buying a fancy camera won't automatically improve the quality of your images. If you want to photograph well, there are many different things you have to learn and learn. It's worth starting with the basics.

Offering the user much more opportunities, advanced technology requires knowledge and ability to use these very opportunities in return. Today we will help beginners understand the relationship between aperture, shutter speed and sensitivity - three key parameters in digital photography.

Diaphragm is the size of the lens opening through which light passes at the moment of shooting. It is denoted f / x, where x indicates how much open the aperture is, with a lower number indicating a larger aperture opening. For a beginner, it is enough to understand that the smaller the x, the more clearly the key subject of the picture will stand out, and the rest of the background will be blurred. This is useful when you want to emphasize a particular element of the image.

The higher the x value, the clearer the background will be.

Excerpt - This is the amount of time during which light will hit the photosensitive matrix of the camera when taking a picture. Fast shutter speeds are indicated by fractions of a second, for example 1/500 is one five hundredth of a second. Long exposure (from a second or more) - in the form of a number indicating the number of seconds and quotation marks, for example 2 "or 4". The longer the shutter speed, the more time the subject will be captured, and, accordingly, its movement, as well as the movement of the lens itself, which will manifest themselves as blur.

A fast shutter speed, on the other hand, allows you to sort of freeze time and get a clear picture of even a fast moving object.

Photosensitivity - the sensitivity of the camera matrix to light, measured in ISO units. The higher the ISO value is set in the camera settings, the higher the sensitivity. Too low ISO makes pictures dark and washed out, and too high ISO can lead to the appearance of noise in the photo.

The ability to find a balance between these three fundamental parameters for each specific situation allows you to get pictures with the ideal brightness and color reproduction. The amount and intensity of light, combined with the time that light will enter the light sensor, makes it possible to both get and hopelessly ruin a great shot.

How to understand and organize in your head the connection of these parameters? Try to take advantage of the advice from and imagine controlling the shooting parameters in the form of your usual morning coffee with milk.

Light is the milk in your coffee. The diaphragm is the size of the opening in the milk bag. Aging is the time during which you add milk to coffee. Light sensitivity is the strength of the coffee.

The larger the opening in the bag (diaphragm), the more milk flows through it. The longer you hold the bag over the cup (aging), the more milk flows out of the bag into the coffee. If you are not good at controlling the amount of milk you add, then you probably want to initially make the coffee stronger so that its final strength is less sensitive (less light sensitivity) to the amount of milk in it.

It's a good idea to start experimenting with these settings in good lighting conditions. Select a subject for shooting, then change the values and evaluate the results.

When you have a general understanding of the relationship between shooting parameters and the result, start changing the lighting of the subject. This will help you understand the relationship between parameters and results under different shooting conditions.

The next step is to take pictures of moving objects. Here you will fully discover the effect of shutter speed and sensitivity on the resulting images. Start shooting moving subjects at low sensitivity and slow shutter speeds.

Most cameras control these shooting parameters automatically and save the photographer from having to think about them, but if you want to go beyond standard amateur photography, then manually adjusting aperture, shutter speed and ISO will open up an almost limitless field for you to experiment. Well, in order not to be distracted by unnecessary things when studying, it is recommended for a beginner photographer to turn on autofocus for the duration of the experiments.