Camera - Learning Basics

Trust me, with or without camera you can still learn photography by watching tutorial video on Youtube, or magazine. It is true without camera you may feel some difficulty on how to know the buttons and their functions, but at first it is enough to know several terms related to camera, and their meaning as well.

• Aperture
• Shutter speed
• ISO sensitivity

APERTURE
This is one of the three important things that you are going to deal with camera. Aperture refers to the size of lens diaphragm and it controls the amount of light that will hit the sensor of your camera. 

As you can see in the image above,  going up from f/1.4 to f/16, the aperture size is getting smaller. Too small aperture will allow only small amount of light to hit the sensor, thus making the photo to become underexposed. And too large aperture also will make your photo overexposed, with the presence of the sunlight, of course.Therefore the optimum aperture size for this condition(diagram above) is from f/4 to f/5.6 where the amount of light is rightly balanced.


Besides, aperture will also affect the depth of field. Here is an example :

f5.6

f32

The larger the aperture size, the depth of field will become shallower, thus focusing only on a subject and the background will be blurred. (See photo on the left) 

When using smaller aperture, the depth of field we be deeper, and making the object competes with the background. 

Therefore smaller aperture(with deeper DoF) is usually being used when taking scenery or landscape photography where we want the foreground as well as background focused. 



SHUTTER SPEED
It refers to the exposure time or the duration of light reaching the sensor, or the amount of time that shutter is open. Basically, the longer you let the shutter open, the amount of light that will reach the sensor will increase. For example, in daylight time, we usually set the camera to very fast shutter speed, about 1/300 to 1/4000 sec in order to avoid overexposed photo.

Slow shutter speed
Shutter speed is considered to be "long" or "slow" when it is slower than 1/60th of a second. (Remember, this is marked as 60 on your camera dial or display.) This numbers comes from the fact that most people can only hold a standard lens (between 35mm and 70mm) steady for 1/60th of a second or less. This is different from the commonly used term "long exposure" which usually refers to shutter speeds of over 1 second.

Fast Shutter Speed
Fast shutter speeds are generally considered to be those shutter speeds faster than 1/500th of a second. These shutter speeds are used to freeze, or stop, motion for a clear image when shooting fast subjects.

Fast Shutter Speed

Slow Shutter Speed

ISO SENSITIVITY
ISO sensitivity is a measure of the camera’s ability to capture light. ISO sensitivity is raised by amplifying the signal. Doubling ISO sensitivity doubles the electrical signal, halving the amount of light that needs to fall on the image sensor to achieve optimal exposure.


When lighting is poor, you can use a flash to light portrait subjects. Flash units, however, have limited range. If you raise ISO sensitivity, you can optimally expose both the portrait subject and the background without using a flash at all.

without flash, with high ISO

with flash

Raising ISO sensitivity allows faster shutter speeds, reducing blur caused by subject or camera movement but raising ISO sensitivity can introduce a type of image artifact known as “noise” into your photographs, making them seem grainy. 

Check out my photostream here.