Congratulations, you got your first DSLR (or camera with manual options, but for the purpose of this post, I'm going to say DSLR). Now, maybe you know something about photography, maybe you don't. All you know is you've now got a camera with all these settings and options, and you have absolutely no idea how to work it. What is all this? How do you go about shedding that novice photographer tag? Well, I'll share some basics with you, and a piece of advice I listed for concert photography here is just as applicable to photography in general. The sooner you pick up some of the basic photography concepts AND know how your camera incorporates these concepts in the various settings, the sooner you'll be laughing at the fact you even considered using auto mode.
The very first thing to understand in photography, and this is beaten to death everywhere, is the exposure triangle:
- Aperture - the size of the opening in your lens that allows light to reach the sensor
- Shutter speed - how fast the camera shutter opens, allows light coming through the opening in the lens, and closes
- ISO - Setting for a camera's light sensitivity (think film speed)
Balancing these three items is what yields getting an appropriate exposure. A photo that is overexposed will be too bright and washed out, and a photo that is underexposed will be too dark. It used to be that you had to completely set a camera according to the specifications you calculated using a light meter, and perhaps some experience. Now the camera can do it for you, and it does a fairly good job of it most of the time. What this enables you to do is pick which of the three items you want to change, and let the camera choose the other two for you, or pick two of the three items and let the camera pick the last item for you. Here's the overview on the three:
Aperture - what people get wrong on this is that the aperture number is usually expressed as f4, but the actuality is that it is f/4. Because the 4 is in the denominator of the fraction, the bigger that number, the smaller the hole in the lens. Stands to reason that a smaller hole lets less light in, so other things equal, changing the hole to be smaller will require either letting the shutter stay open longer, or increasing the sensitivity to light. Aperture controls the depth of field of a shot, which in laymen's terms is how blurry or clear the foreground and background of a photo are.
Shutter speed - this too is almost always going to be a fraction. As the number gets larger (say from one sixtieth of a second to one thirtieth of a second), the amount of light getting into the camera increases, so a smaller aperture or less light sensitivity is needed, other things equal. Shutter speed controls the motion in a photo; a fast shutter speed freezes motion while a slow shutter speed will have motion blur.
ISO - the larger the ISO, the more sensitive your sensor is to light. This is the tool you'll use to get the result you want if you have a particular aperture and shutter speed you want to use for a photo. The higher the ISO, the less crisp a photo is due to the introduction of noise into the photo.
Okay, great, so you've got the basics of the triangle, but how do you use them? Well, the three main modes you should become used to are your shutter priority mode, your aperture priority mode, and manual mode. Each camera has a different way of denoting it on its dial, so me stating what they are on my camera may not help you. Experiment with these modes; work on aperture mode when you want to control depth of field or when you know you'll challenged to capture light easily. If you want a nice, blurry background, like for a portrait, you'll want a wider aperture, so a smaller number in the denominator. For more crisp, clear backgrounds, you'll want a larger number in the denominator, which is what you'll want for something like landscape photography. If you are taking action shots, say of children playing or a sports event, you'll want to use shutter priority with a fast shutter speed, likely around 1/250 of a second (but experiment to get the results you'd like). For night shots, you'll need a longer shutter speed (and likely a tripod or very high ISO). Play around in each of these modes at different ISO levels. While it is pretty simple to get the mathematical relationship between "stops", many people don't think in those terms, so trial and error is the way you can navigate around having to think about the numbers too much. Lastly, what you may find is that the camera, while it may say that your photo is perfectly exposed, may not be giving you the results you want. I'll address the reason for that below, but one option you have is to bracket your photo by using an Exposure Value (EV) shift. Your camera will allow you to basically tell it to overexpose or underexpose a photo on purpose. Play around with it to see if it helps, or maybe you simply prefer to leave it one third of a stop (denoted by 0.3) down or up as a matter of style or preference. You can also place your camera into burst mode and make it so the camera takes three exposures, one at normal exposure, one that is underexposed, and one that is overexposed. This can come in handy if you don't have time to manually changed your settings between shots to tweak, but you want to have a margin of safety in case your camera doesn't get the result you want on a normal exposure.
There are a few other settings/buttons you'll want to know. First is your focusing mode. DON'T leave this on auto-selection; you want the focus on autofocus so the lens will focus to the point you select, but you don't want the camera picking where that point is for you. There are various modes you can put your focus into which primarily relate to whether or not your camera will follow focus on a moving object or if it stays focused on the point you picked regardless of if the subject moves or not. I typically leave it on AI single, which uses the latter of those two strategies. The other item of note is your camera's metering mode. Metering is how the camera evaluates the exposure of the image you are viewing through the lens. What the camera can do is evaluate the image as a whole, or if can give priority to some section of the center of the photo. Perhaps you find that your photo is too dark; that could be because the metering is set to evaluate the whole frame, and the bright sky makes the camera select a shutter speed that makes a person in the center of the photo remain underexposed. What you can do is change the metering to center weighted or spot metering to make the camera base the exposure on what is strictly towards or at the center of the frame. The shutter will stay open longer, the person will be properly exposed, but the sky will be overexposed in all likelihood. This is inevitable for photos where different portions of the frame have drastically deviant lighting.
These items should give you a good foundation to understand enough of what you are doing and give you ways to go out and try tinkering with your camera. Of course, taking pictures and learning from the shots you get is the only way to truly advance your comfort and skill level. That said, what are you waiting for? Get out there and shoot!
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