Amazing! You have just made the decision to bring your creative ambitions to the next level, and took a leap of faith to face the challenge of understanding how to shoot manually with a camera! For many an intimidating step. You look at your camera, and you are seeing all these words, these numbers, icons, all these abbreviations.. and you are thinking to yourself: “What did I just get myself into?”
Before you even put that camera down.. stop for a moment, and let’s take a look at what everything means. Knowledge is power. The more you know and understand about this subject, the better photos you will soon be able to take. Though it may look intimidating, it is actually easier than you may think.
To jumpstart your photographic journey, it is important to understand ‘exposure’. You may or may not remember that in a more recent past, people were taking photos with film cameras. Inside these cameras, you would use a roll of photographic film to record your photos. This film was sensitive to light. Simply said, you would expose your photographic film to light coming through your lens. Hence the term ‘exposure’.
Your digital camera is an incredibly smart tool. It can measure electronically whether your exposure was perfect, underexposed (too dark), or overexposed (too bright). This is very useful to quickly achieve perfect exposures. At the same time, it can help you become a better photographer, as you will consciously have to think and assess the situation, and adjust your camera settings to obtain the perfect exposure.
During the film days, we could only know if we obtained proper exposures once all the film was used and developed into a real photo. Luckily, we now have the access to digital cameras. Instead of using photographic film, these cameras use image sensors to digitally record your photos. With these cameras, you can easily check on a screen on the back of your camera if you exposed your sensor correctly or not, without having to wait until your photo was fully developed.
So, how would you know if the photo was correctly exposed or not? And how can you influence your exposure through your camera settings? To answer these questions, we will be looking at three factors, namely: ‘aperture’, ‘shutter speed’, and ‘ISO’.
When it comes to measuring light and exposure in photography, and adjusting your settings to influence your exposure, we refer the amount of light as a ‘stop’ of light. You can add or reduce one or multiple stops of light by carefully adjusting your aperture, shutter speed, ISO, or a combination of the three.
Would you like to learn more on how to do this? Please head on over to our ‘Aperture’ article, to take the next step in your photography. Actually, we will give you the choice which topic you would like to learn about first. After all, it is your learning journey, right?