Every time you take a photo, you need to keep an eye on 4 settings on your camera.
They are: Shutter speed, Aperture, Whitebalance, and ISO. They all work together to produce pretty photos. Let's talk about them.
Shutter speed
The shutter is kind of like your eyelid. It controls how much light gets into your camera system by how long it's open. If a photo is blurry, it's usually because of the shutter speed. Too slow a shutter speed results in blurry photos; too fast, you lose a lot of light. For sharp images, you want your shutter speed to be fast enough to avoid blurring and slow enough to let in enough light. There may be instances where, for artistic reasons, you want some blur -- and you can do that, too, once you understand how the shutter works.
We spend all of class 2 in the Photography 1 course on the shutter. We look at what it does, how it does it, why you should care, and how you might use the shutter artistically. We then do a demonstration, taking everyone through a range of shutter speeds, so students can see what that looks like, and then there is an assignment where everyone gets to practice what they've learned, to further cement the freshly gained knowledge in their brain. In the next class, we look at how everyone did before we move on to the aperture.
Aperture
The aperture works kind of like the iris of your eye. It controls how much light gets into your camera system by how wide it's open. Your aperture setting determines the depth of field in your photo - whether your background and foreground are sharp or fuzzy. If you set your aperture to a smaller number, your background and foreground will be fuzzier. A higher number will make your photo generally sharper. Again, there are artistic considerations to this, and once you know how to use the aperture setting properly, you will know how to create some very pleasant effects in your photos. Class 3 of Photography 1 is all about aperture and lenses.
Whitebalance:
Well, now I'm all out of eye comparisons. Whitebalance is responsible for color cast, or lack thereof, in your photos. You use it to tell the camera what light source you're using. Indoor light and outdoor light can be quite different, of course, and your camera needs to be set accordingly. And here's an extra tip to keep in mind: if you take a photo that looks bluish or weirdly orange, your whitebalance setting is the culprit. Class 5 of Photography-1 is all about light, lighting, and whitebalance.
ISO
ISO setting determines how sensitive your camera is to the amount of light in a scene. This can be helpful, of course, but you also need to be cautious that you don't push it too far. If you do, you may see noise in areas of your image that are supposed to be dark. It may sound strange to talk about seeing noise. What's next ... hearing colors? In photography, noise actually shows up as speckles of color, and the more sensitive you make your camera system to light, the more you risk it looking like someone scattered a handful of ice cream sprinkles over the darkest parts of your image. In class 4 of Photography-1 we look at ISO and how you use it together with the shutter and aperture to manage exposure.
To try this out, maybe look at the Try This blog post or join us for a Photography-1 course.
