Introduction:
Q: What kind of camera do you have? Do you use Nikon or Canon? Do you shoot .jpg or RAW? Do you use Bridge or Aperture or Lightroom?
A: Nikon or Canon, digital or film, .jpg or RAW … all are just tools in a photographer’s toolbox. The question I am most often asked is best answered in “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke. read more…
Lesson 1: Focal Length
Remember, we agreed that you’re looking to create images that are first and foremost in-focus and not too bright (overexposed) or too dark (underexposed.) Simple. First learn the rules, then learn to break them.
Lenses come in various focal lengths, the length or distance from the front of the lens to the camera’s sensor measured in millimeters. read more…
Lesson 2: Exposure
Q: I chose a 105mm lens, but how do I get the flowers to go all blurry in the background when shooting portraits? I’ve got a 200mm lens so I can get close enough to him without getting wet, but how do I freeze the water that my son is splashing in the pool? My daughter is jumping on her bed; I have a 28mm lens. What do I use to make the other settings work so that I can freeze her in the air mid-jump?
A: Here’s the magic equation:
Exposure = ISO + Aperture + Shutter Speed read more…
Lesson 3: Aperture
Each stop on the aperture scale = one full stop of light.
Take our exposure equation that we learned last post:
Exposure = ISO (sensitivity to light) + Aperture (amount of light made available to record an image) + Shutter Speed (the length of time the light is made available to record an image)
How sensitive you’re making your camera to light + how much light you’re letting in and for how long. That’s it! That’s your exposure equation. How much light you’re letting in is controlled by aperture. Think of aperture as pouring light onto your sensor through your lens; at f/2.8, you’re just dumping it in wide open but by the time you stop down to f/22, you’re pouring it quite carefully through a small funnel. read more…
Lesson 4: Exposure (Review)
If I handed a beginner my camera in manual mode and asked the beginner to pick the settings to shoot a portrait of me, a beginner would search his or her brain for the “correct” exposure. That kind of thinking gets beginners into trouble. If you’ve been a beginner for a long time, you need to do an about-face; turn yourself around and slowly start backing out of the dark, optionless void of glorified Xerox machine photography. There is no “correct” exposure. There’s only the exposure the photographer chooses to make the image he or she wants.
Remember this:
Q: What kind of camera should I buy?
A: What kind of pictures are you looking to take?
I understand where it comes from: we’ve all taken photos that were technically incorrect. Perhaps we missed an important shot that can never be re-created — a baby’s first steps or a graduate accepting a degree, and that makes us fear photographic mistakes. We have a natural desire to learn how NOT to mess up a photo like that again. read more…
Lesson 5: Shutter Speed
Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of seconds. 1/2 is one-half second, which is pretty fast in general terms but actually pretty slow for a shutter speed. 1/8000 of a second is pretty fast in general terms and in photography.
Shutter speeds are important when you’re trying to show action, either by using blur to show movement or by freezing action. read more…
Lesson 6: ISO
Aperture controls the amount of light coming in through the lens, shutter speed controls the amount of time in which light is allowed to reach the sensor. ISO lets you control how sensitive your sensor is in reacting to that light. Just like the aperture and shutter speed scales, ISO moves from left to right, 32 being the lowest and 3200 being quite high, each stop along the way doubling or halving (depending on which direction you’re going) the amount of light sensitivity the sensor needs to properly record an image. read more…
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