Understanding Your Equipment (Part 2)

Hopefully the last little article helped you with understanding the light meter on your camera and the metering settings. Once you get a pretty good grasp on this it will go a long way to helping insure your images have the desired exposure.

I had recommended setting your camera to auto and keeping a log of the images you took so you could go back and review the Meta data from those files. In the groupings notice how your camera decided in Auto mode to use certain F-Stop numbers, Shutter Speeds. Typically on auto under good lighting circumstances your camera will try to bump up the shutter speed to compensate for excess light and bring in the correct exposure. Under bad circumstances it brings it down and typically uses the lowest aperture for the given lens. These will be your prime elements when composing shots, ensuring that you get exactly what you want. ISO, and white balance play a pretty good part in what you are trying to achieve but, we are going to address those later on.

Let’s get a few little details out of the way right now. These are some things you need to know were and how on your camera to change. First will be your shutter speed, it should be dictated by a some type of thumb wheel on most SLR’s. Then Aperture should also have a dedicated thumb wheel but, I know on some DSLR cameras the same wheel changes both of these usually while holding another button down to adjust one or the other. (Refer to your owner’s manual). On just about every DSLR I have ever seen these settings are interchangeable for SS and F-Stop Values. You should also have an independent ISO button somewhere on the camera body and possibly a white balance. I think most DSLR’s have the independent ISO setting but, on some the white balance may be a menu setting. Once you have found this start learning how each one can change the metered exposure on your light meter. Higher F-Stop numbers, higher shutter speeds and lower ISO numbers are going to bring your exposure down. Thus the opposite is true for bringing the exposure of your image up. The trick is finding a happy median sometimes especially when shooting hand held shots.

Some points I want to hit here are: a higher F-Number (meaning a closed aperture) brings more of the image into focus. Lower apertures are going to let more light in onto your sensor and thus the focal area is reduced as a cause and effect. Higher shutter speeds are going to allow you to capture faster moving objects, and slower ones are going to show movement, and in the case of handheld shots it might be your movement if you have it set to low. (This is the prime reason I recommend using a tripod for any shots that it is feasible to do so, especially landscapes). Higher ISO values are going to bring more noise into the image or a film grain effect. Depending on the camera, how well it reduces noise and how much noise you can stand in your finished image, will dictate how you use this setting. Under low light situations were you have dialed the aperture, your shutter speed all the way to down and you still have an under exposure with great loss of detail bump up the ISO to get more light in. It may cause a lot of noticeable grain in the image but, it is better than going to low on your shutter speed and having a blurry image.

I am going to touch on white balance a bit just because it does affect exposure values. White Balance is basically color temperature. As the day wears on color temperatures change, as the seasons change they change. The color temperature changes in the shade, and under different types of lighting situations. It is an ever changing thing to be honest. The only step I recommend at this point is to leave your camera’s white balance setting to auto unless you have a highly noticeable blue or red hue to your image. The blue means you need to bring your white balance up and red means it needs to come down. We will worry more about this later don’t put to much thought into right now.

Thank you as always and pleas visit anthonypostonphotography.com for more information email me at anthonyposton@hotmail.com. Find Anthony Poston Photography on Facebook and Twitter. Please visit our other blog Bankhead National Forest (bankheadphotos.blogspot.com)