Photography Basics 101 - Exposure
Welcome back to another journal entry! This entry talks about some of the fundamentals of photography with some example pictures that I have taken.
I honestly started photography about a couple years ago and I knew nothing about it (and I still feel like I don’t at times). I started out with my iPhone camera and to be honest, it is great learning tool at first but my photos lacked exposure. Things were either too dark / too bright and I had little to no control of my settings. Most of the time, the iPhone took care a lot of the features for me. I wanted to dive deeper into understanding what makes a photo jaw-dropping amazing, epic and almost cinematic. These characteristics are all influenced by exposure / lighting and making sure that they are taken care of during the shoot so that editing would be much easier later.
By the end of this entry, I hope to be able to explain the fundamentals of photography by going through the definitions, provide weird analogies and provide examples for you to see.
Overview
There are a couple of terms I want to cover in this journal entry. The terms that I want to cover is Aperture, ISO and Shutter Speed. These elements make up the exposure / lighting of a photo (also known as the Exposure Triangle). To put into perspective, your eye itself is a camera. When light enters the eye, the light gets deflected through your lens and goes directly to the retina of the eye, where the information gets processed by the brain. The amount of light coming into your eye is controlled through your pupil.
Aperture
Aperture is the lens opening (also known as the shutter on a camera) and is measured in f-stops. The smaller the f-stop is, the wider the shutter opening is and vice versa. Having a small f-stop would create a lower depth of field where it starts to isolate a subject from the background (i.e. f1.4, f1,8). A larger f-stop would increase the depth of field and allow the viewer to gauge the distance between the background and the focus (i.e. f11 or f22 even). This is represented with numbers such as f1.4, f2.8, f4, f8, and f16 as an example. The shutter opening for a f1.4 is a lot larger than an f16 as an example. Back to the eye anatomy analogy, this would be similar to the pupil of your eye.
A good understanding of how aperture works would be a visit at the eye doctors / ophthalmologist office…when you need to get your eyes dilated. When your eyes get dilated, the pupil opens up and there would be a blinding amount of light that enters into your eyes, making it hard to see and walk. Naturally, your eyes would adjust this for you. Your eyes would normally constrict when there is a large amount of light around and dilate when there is not enough light around. When you have a smaller f-stop in this case, lots of light would enter to the camera.
A Good Tip: For portraits, use a lower f-stop (f1.4-f5.6 would be a good start) and for landscapes, use higher f-stops (f8-f11 as an example, any higher would probably make the image a bit dark).
Portrait photos for example, typically have a lower f-stop so that the subject is distinguished from the environment. The “haze” that it creates in the environment is known as bokeh.
Photos below describe the variation in aperture
First Photo - Aperture of f3.5 at a plant. The plant was right up front against the lens and the background is the bokeh.
Second Photo - A photo of me modeling with an aperture of f5.6.
Third Photo - The Mokauea Island, photographed at f11 where the photo is sharp and crisp during a helicopter ride
ISO
ISO is the light sensitivity levels for your camera. With a lower ISO, the image will look more clear compared to an image with a higher ISO. A high ISO would result to a grainy photo with lots of noise. A recommendation would be to drop the ISO as much as possible so that the image taken will not be grainy. On my camera, this is set to automatic, to allow the camera to judge for itself. The lowest that it could usually go to is 100 and highest I’ve seen is up to 204800.
Shutter Speed
Shutter Speed is the duration where the camera’s shutter is open to allow light to reach the sensor. This is measured in seconds. When the shutter speed is longer, the brighter the image will be and when the shutter speed is shorter, the darker the image will be. This can be expressed as 1/1000”, 1/15”, 1.0” and such. A thing to note about having a longer shutter speed is that if you start shaking a little bit, your photo may end up blurry. The slightest shake can mess up an image.
Photographers have manipulated shutter speed in various scenarios to create “light painting” as an example. How this works is that at night, the dark environment does not allow for a lot of light in. When a subject comes in with a bright light and starts moving with the light, the camera starts to take in the light trail that it creates onto an image. Think of this as a timed painting on a dark mural with a white paint brush. The moment where you start painting the dark mural with the white brush and the moment where you lift the brush off the mural is the “shutter speed”.
Examples below are some pictures where I played around with the shutter speed.
First Photo: The picture below is an example where manipulating the shutter speed would create a light painting. The shutter speed was set to about 5 seconds, allowing a couple cars to move from the left of the screen to the right of the screen. The trick to getting this shot was that the camera had to be steady, so I used a tripod to keep this stable. Otherwise, a hand held shot would have been blurry.
Second Photo: This was a tough shot to do. Similarly to the first photo, I used the car’s rear lights and headlamps to create a light streak as the backdrop. (I also had to hold my breath, stay still for about 3.2 seconds and not move in the cold to not end up blurry for this picture…)
Third Photo: This waterfall shot was done at a shutter speed of about 1/4 seconds. Any longer than 1 second would have made the image too bright. This was a bit blurry because it was a hand held shot…
