Photography Basics

Let's start with a few photography basics. We'll be talking about the exposure triangle.

This would help us give a better understanding of the below mentioned features.

• ISO– the measure of a digital camera sensor’s sensitivity to light
• Aperture– the size of the opening in the lens when a picture is taken
• Shutter Speed– the amount of time that the shutter is open

In order to get the correct exposure, we need to master these three elements.

Most importantly – a change in one of the elements will impact the others. This means that you can never really isolate just one of the elements alone but always need to have the others in the back of your mind.

There are numerous examples to simplify the relationship between these three, let me take the simplest approach to give you a better understanding.

The Door

Imagine your camera is like a door with shutters that open and close.

Aperture is the size of the door. If it’s bigger more light gets through and the room is brighter.

Shutter Speed is the amount of time that the shutters of the door is open. The longer you leave them open the more that comes in.

Now imagine that you’re inside the room and are wearing sunglasses (hopefully this isn’t too much of a stretch). Your eyes become desensitized to the light that comes in (it’s like a low ISO).

There are a number of ways of increasing the amount of light in the room (or at least how much it seems that there is. You could increase the time that the shutters are open (decrease shutter speed), you could increase the size of the door (increase aperture) or you could take off your sunglasses (make the ISO larger).

Mastering the art of exposure is something that takes a lot of practice. In many ways it’s a juggling act and even the most experienced photographers experiment and tweak their settings as they go. Keep in mind that changing each element not only impacts the exposure of the image but each one also has an impact upon other aspects of it (i.e. changing aperture changes depth of field, changing ISO changes the graininess of a shot and changing shutter speed impacts how motion is captured).