Exposure Mastery: Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO: The Difference Between Good and Breathtaking Photographs
By Brian Black
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Reviews for Exposure Mastery
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A must read for anyone wanting to understand exposure and looking to get more out of their DSLR camera.
Book preview
Exposure Mastery - Brian Black
Introduction: About Light
If you’ve bought an expensive, high-quality camera, you want to do more with it than just point and shoot. You’ve invested in a good camera because you want to get serious about photography, maybe explore it as a profession. Certainly you want to explore the possibilities in photography as an art form.
Photography as creative art flows from the physics of photography. It’s all about light, just as vision itself is all about light.
Light reflects from objects, passes through and is focused by the lens, and strikes something that registers the light and creates a picture. In the eye, that something is the retina, which sends information to the brain via the optic nerve. In a conventional film camera, the light is focused on a chemically-treated plastic strip that undergoes chemical changes in response to light energy. In a digital camera, the working part is an electronic sensor that creates a packet of information, which the camera stores in digital memory.
But in each of these methods of creating a picture of the world, the key role is played by light – and in photography, light is measured as exposure. How long the camera’s sensor is exposed to light (shutter speed), how much light is allowed in at once (aperture), and how sensitive the sensor is to light (ISO) determine the quality of the image. Digital cameras come with light meters that automatically set these three variables to achieve a good
photographic image, but the creative part of photography comes, in large measure, from bypassing that automatic snapshot setting and taking control of the exposure yourself.
There’s a reciprocal relationship between aperture and shutter speed. The narrower the aperture, the less light is allowed into the camera at any moment. The faster the shutter speed, the less light is allowed in over the time of exposure. This means that if you need to allow more light in to take a picture in dim lighting, you can do this either by slowing down the shutter speed or by widening the aperture. Either approach will allow sufficient exposure, but produce a very different effect. A wide aperture creates low depth of field, with only a small area in focus and objects closer or more distant rendered out of focus. A narrow aperture creates high depth of field, with more of the picture in focus and not as much left as a blur. A fast shutter speed captures motion sharply and crisply, while a slow shutter speed shows traces of objects in motion as a streak across the image. Clearly, then, using a narrow aperture (with a slow shutter speed to compensate) produces a very different image than using a fast shutter speed (with a wider aperture to compensate). That’s only one example of creative control of exposure.
In this book, we’ll cover the technical details of exposure and how the triangle of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed operates. You’ll find definitions for terms like f-stop, and explanations of the numerical values used to describe photography elements. More importantly, you’ll find a lot of ideas about how to use exposure and all the factors affecting it to create desired effects in your photography. The goal is to let you move beyond point and shoot to become an artist with your camera.
Recommended Equipment
If you want to take advantage of the possibilities inherent in digital SLR photography, you’re going to have to spend a bit of money on a good camera and accessories. However, there’s still a pretty wide range of prices. As long as you go with a well-respected manufacturer, you can expect quality. That said, the biggest and best camera makers are Canon and Nikon, so if you're going to buy a DSLR camera, it's highly recommended that you get one made by either of the two.
Creative Digital Photography: The Parts
Your camera is a complicated