Tag Archives: iso

The 10 Step Process To Capturing What You See

I know the frustration, I’ve heard it before, and I’ve said myself.

“How do I just capture what I see through the viewfinder, on the screen?”

When you buy your SLR, your first thought is quality, and control. That’s what the camera gives you. So it can be incredibly frustrating when you pick up your camera, and it’s just not doing what you want it to.

From what I remember, it comes from a range of problems. The pop-up flash keeps kicking in, the shutter speed isn’t letting enough light in, or there’s too much blur, perhaps the depth of field is all wrong. The list goes on.

This post is all about knowing what to do to counteract these problems.

Follow these in order.

Flash

First of all, what you’re currently seeing does not involve a flash. Not even one, off-camera, behind a large softbox. You want to capture the light you currently see, and that means saying goodbye to the flash. This may cause a number of other problems, but this is step one, and something we can deal with.

Aperture

The aperture control the sharpness and the depth of field of your photo. The wider the aperture, the shallower the depth of field, the narrower the aperture, the deeper the depth of field. We will get to sharpness in a moment.

Picture this. You’re taking a photos of a landscap, using your kit lens, and the aperture is set to f/3.5. The aperture of f/3.5 is about the widest a standard kit lens will go, and this produces a reasonably shallow depth of field. This is clearly no good for landscapes.

So depth of field is something you need to consider when taking a photo. Do you want to capture something in the distance, as well as the foreground? You’ll need to use a narrower aperture, I would suggest at least f/8 or narrower. If it’s a landscape, consider focusing about a third into your frame, to make the most of the DoF.

Sharpness won’t be so much of a problem, but if you want to take the sharpest photos possible with your lens, I would suggest an aperture of between f/8 and f/11. This is typically where lenses are at their sharpest.

Shutter Speed

The second factor of exposure is shutter speed. You need to do two things when choosing the right shutter speed. Firstly, the speed must be fast enough to freeze/capture any motion in the photo. If you want to capture a moving car, you’re going to have to crank up the speed a bit, perhaps to 1/500 or 1/1000.

The next thing you need to think about is whether or not you have enough light for the exposure. If your shutter speed is too fast, then your photo may be underexposed, unless of course you change your ISO or aperture.

ISO

When working with exposure, I prioritise either the shutter speed or aperture, depending on what I’m shooting, and find the correct seeing for that first. Say I know I need my aperture to be f/11 for a portrait, I would set this first. Then I would set the shutter speed. I may need a speed of 1/250 to freeze any movement, but this would likely mean an underexposed photo.

So what do I do?

I turn up the ISO. The ISO always comes last in exposure. I set my aperture and shutter speed exactly how I need them, and then make up any difference with the ISO.

That’s exposure covered, but what about the rest?

Shooting Mode

When I talk about shooting modes, I’m talking about manual, shutter speed priority, aperture priority, full auto mode, program mode, etc. You basically want to only pay attention to the first three listed there.

If you use full auto mode, it will use the flash at some of the most pointless times, it’s really a rubbish mode. Program is a little better, but you’re still handing too much control to the camera, and not yourself. Stick to manual or a priority mode, and you’ll be able to capture what you see.

If you would like to know more about manual mode, click here.

Focus Mode

Do you ever find that you’re taking a photo of someone and the focus is moving in and out, in and out, never quite stopping where you want it to? Chances are you’re on the wrong focus mode, and this can really hold you back. To fully understand how different focus modes work on your camera, click here.

Metering Mode

This is actually really important, more so than you might think. It essentially determines how your camera looks at a frame before deciding on the exposure. You can change how much of the frame the camera is looking at, where it’s looking in the frame, even give priority to where you’re focused. I find that when I’m not seeing the results I want with my exposure, it’s usually down to the metering mode, so pay this the attention it deserves!

White Balance

The wrong white balance will change the colour of your photo, usually to either too orange or too blue.

For example, if you’re shooting in a tungsten light, and you’re on auto white balance, then chances are your camera is going to get it wrong. Your photos will come out looking too orange. You need to change your white balance to the correct preset, or use one of the other methods listed in this post to fix it. The wrong colour cast is not capturing what you see.

Composition

This is something that beginners don’t pay too much attention to, mostly because they don’t seem to be too aware of it. My biggest pet peeve is a really simple one, and that’s dead space. On Facebook, I’m constantly seeing group photos of people, taken by people who don’t know hot to frame the photo.

Don’t spend so much time focused on your subject, that you actually forget to have a look at what’s around you, and how you can include (or exclude) this in (from) the frame too.

Post Production & Dynamic Range

So you might be surprised to see post production here, but it’s not the sort of PP that you may be used to. We’re not looking to radically change a photo, we just want to change it to make it look more like what we saw when we took the photo. To do this, we may need to change the dynamic range.

For those of you who don’t know, the dynamic range is between the maximum and minimum amount of light. White and black essentially. This range is very large with our eyes, but our cameras (digital, at least) don’t have such a large dynamic range. To counteract this, we need to use PP to make some minor adjustments. I like to use the burn and dodge tools to finish of the photo.

That’s it, if you would like to download my free ebook, click here.

A Beginner’s Guide To Photography

I’ve been writing on this site for a while now, and I’ve put together a lot of good content, but the trouble is that a lot of it can be hard to find, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. This post will walk you though everything that a beginner in photography should learn, and in the order that they’re supposed to learn it. Welcome to my 100th post.

You should know that there is now a video version of this post, and it can be viewed here.

Exposure

The most basic and essential part of photography is exposure. Learning how exposure works will help you to take control of your camera, and take better photos. As you start to learn what shutter speed, aperture and ISO does, you’ll learn about the other effects that each have on your photos, which can produce creative results. If you only have time to learn one aspect of photography, then this is it, as you’ll start to move away from full auto or program modes, and learn how to use your camera properly.

Aperture

If we cover exposure in the order that the light enters the camera, then the aperture always comes first. The linked article will explain aperture in much more detail, but to put it into layman’s terms, the aperture is very simliar to the pupil of your eye – the wider it is, the more light it will let in. There are side effects to using certain apertures, namely depth of field, but we’ll get to that in a post further down the page. I found exposure much more complicated before I learnt the aperture scale, so try to make sure that you memorise it, and understand the f-stop scale, so that you can use the knowledge to take better photos in the future.

The scale is as follows: f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22.

Here is the full tutorial on Aperture.

Shutter Speed

After aperture, comes shutter speed. It will effectively take the amount of light that the lens has let though, and then only use a fraction of a second’s worth (usually), depending on the lighting situation. Different speeds can have different uses. You would want to use a longer speed of around 30 seconds for night photography on a tripod, but you may want a speed of around 1/1000 of a second if you’re shooting a fast moving subject. It all depends on what you’re shooting and how much light you have available. Shutter speed was the first thing I learnt when I got my SLR because I wanted to be able to freeze motion and remove any potential blur. Looking back though, I wish I’d learnt aperture first.

Here is the full tutorial on Shutter Speed.

ISO

Once you’ve decided how much light you’re going to let through to the sensor, it’s then time to decide how much more you need. This may sound confusing, because surely you let in as much light as you need in the first place, right? Wrong. The problem is that you have to be able to change your aperture and shutter speed to suit your shooting situation if you want to get good, and unblurred results, but unfortunately this doesn’t always provide you with enough light. This is when you can then decide to increase your ISO to make the camera more sensitive to the light. Watch out though, because the higher the ISO, the more grain the camera will produce. More about that in the full post though.

Here is the full tutorial on ISO.

Understanding Your Camera

Metering Modes

Rather awkwardly for beginners, exposure isn’t as simple as learning about aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you also have to learn about how your camera looks at light. There are different metering modes, that can be used for different lighting situations, which will better instruct your camera how your want it to expose. This is especially important if you’re not shooting on manual because you leave part of the exposure up to the camera. By using various metering modes such as ‘spot metering’ you can completely change the amount of light going into the camera. Understanding this may just be the key to understanding why your photos are coming out underexposed.

Here is the full tutorial on Metering Modes.

Depth of Field

When you’re shooting in low light, you invariably have to widen your aperture to allow enough light into the lens, but this has one rather major side effect – shallow depth of field. This can be used very creatively, often to excess, but it’s not all good. There are many situations, such as group photos, where you’ll want to have a narrower aperture so that you can get everyone in focus. This tutorial will walk you though everything you need to know about choosing the right aperture for the right situation.

Here is the full tutorial on Depth of Field.

White Balance

White balance is something I wish I’d learnt more about much sooner than I did, because I look back on some photos now and wonder what I was thinking. The white balance changes the colour cast of the entire photo, and is responsible for the warmth of a photo. It is effectively shifting the colour from blue to orange, from cold to warm, and it does so depending on which balance you choose. Auto white balance doesn’t tend to do a particularly good job, particularly with tungsten light, so the sooner you learn how to control it yourself, the more accurate your photos will look.

Here is the full tutorial on White Balance.

Focal Length

This was actually the first tutorial that I wrote, because at the time, it wasn’t something I understood too well. Have you ever wondered what the millimeter on your lens actually means? Or why people use longer focal lengths for portraits? It’s all discussed in this tutorial, as the focal length affects more than just the zoom, it changes the perspective too. I also cover which focal length you would use in certain situations, as well as their possible side effects. It’s really a worthwhile read and one of my favourite tutorials to date.

Here is the full tutorial on Focal Length.

Crop Factor

A lot of you may not realise it, but unless you spend about $3000 on your camera, then you’re more than likely going to be shooting on a crop sensor. That basically means that your sensor is smaller than professional SLR cameras, and that basically crops the image. This has a range of effects on your photos, as it’ll crop the image to a narrower viewing angle, and will influence your choice of lens purchases in the future. This tutorial is a must for any beginner photographer who wants to understand their camera more.

Here is the full tutorial on the Crop Factor.

The Nifty Fifty

What can I say about the nifty fifty? What’s not to love? For those of you that don’t know, when I talk about the nifty fifty, I’m talking about the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens that can be picked up very cheap for most digital SLRs. It’s a great introduction to buying better quality lenses, and an excellent way of getting to grips with aperture. The article linked is a review and a guide, and I wrote it because I recommend this lens as the first upgrade that every beginner photographer should make. It’s easy to use, and for the price, will yield some excellent results.

Here is the full tutorial on the 50mm f/1.8.

Composition

It’s important to understand exposure, but if you can’t get to grips with basic composition, then you’ll struggle to take really good photos. I’m not saying that good photos always include compositional rules, because that’s often far from true, but it helps to learn these rules so that you can forget them in the future. That may sound stupid, but these rules are really only guides, and the more you know about them, the better your understanding will be of how a photo works.

Rule of Thirds

This is probably the first compositional rule that any photographer comes across, and that’s for a very good reason – it’s simple and it works. The basic premise is that you divide your camera’s frame up into thirds and plant key objects in these lines, and the composition will work better. This often works really well and if you’ve not learnt much about photography yet – it’s a great way of dramatically improving your photos and making them more interesting. The idea is that the viewer gets to see more than just the subject and is free to, and encouraged, to explore the photo themselves.

Here is the full tutorial on the Rule of Thirds.

Visual Weight

Visual weigh is different to size or weight as we know it, and it’s largely down to different elements, such as human eyes and writing. When you can understand visual weight a lot more, you’ll start to understand how people look at photos, and how you can position certain elements in a frame to direct the viewers attention. It’s no so much a tool, or a rule, as it is an understanding.
Here is the full tutorial on Visual Weight.

Balance

Balance in a photo has a big affect on how we feel when we look at the photo, as an unbalanced photo can make us feel uneasy, where as a balanced photo, will make us feel more relaxed. It really doesn’t matter whether you choose to make the photo balanced or unbalanced, but you should understand why you’ve chosen one or the other, and have reasons to justify this choice. Again, it’s one of those situations where the more you know, the easier it will be to produce the desired effect.

Here is the full tutorial on Balance.

This was my 100th tutorial today, so I hope you’ve gotten something out of it, I know I’ve gotten a lot out of writing them. If you have any questions, please come over to Facebook and I’ll be happy to help. Thanks, Josh.

How a Professional Photographer uses his Camera

I hear a lot of people talk speak proudly about how they only ever shoot in manual, and it’s inspired me to write this post, because, quite frankly, I think it’s a load of rubbish. Here’s the way I like to shoot and the different modes that I use. It's important to remember that whatever works for you and your photography is fine, just so long as you're getting the results you want.

Shooting Mode

I should start out by saying that I use Aperture Priority, Shutter Speed Priority and Manual modes an equal amount, but I use them all for different things, but more importantly, different times of day and lighting situations.

When I have plenty of available light, I use Aperture Priority as it allows me to set my aperture to where I know it will be sharpest and usually the best depth of field. That’s usually around f/8-f/11, a couple stops larger than the smallest aperture. Shooting in this mode means that the shutter speed will change accordingly, and at longer focal lengths where you need a faster shutter speed to prevent from motion blur this may be a problem, but if I have to, I can always widen the aperture.

When there's less light, I find it best to use Shutter Speed Priority, because you can fix an under exposed photo in post production, but there's nothing you can do about a blurry one. If I'm shooting on a 35mm lens, I like the shutter speed to be around, 1/50 of a second, but I can hold it still for 1/25 if I need to. Again, the aperture will sort itself out, even if the camera's flashing a warning because there's not enough light, it will still take the photo. If you were to shoot in low light in manual, your camera would tell you that the aperture isn't wide enough and you need to wide it or slow down your shutter speed, but if you were to change it, you would essentially be doing what Shutter Speed Priority was doing for you in the first place.

Manual mode comes out in my camera when I'm in unfamiliar conditions, and more often than not, when I'm using my flash in the dark or when I'm in controlled conditions. I'll give you an examples of that; last night I was shooting with a model and I had my shutter speed set to 1/10, aperture of f/2.8, ISO 640 and my flash compensation boosted by 2ev. I know that because of the speed at which my flash fires, it will freeze the motion of the model and any camera shake that my hand may produce becomes insignificant. All this being said, I would suggest that everyone learn on manual mode because it's like learning to drive a car in manual – the more you learn, the more knowledge you'll have to help you in the future.

ISO

I've had mixed feelings about ISO in the past, but we seem to be getting along well together now. When I first started out, I knew that high ISO's made you photos grainy and reduced the quality, and back then, that's all I needed to know to not want to go near it. Now though, I've come around to the idea of a higher ISO as I work to produce interesting backgrounds in my photography. I use a low ISO when I can, but when I'm shooting at night with a flash, I hate having a dark and dull background because I'm busy relying on my flash to illuminate my subject. When you raise your ISO, you fill in much more background detail and in the right conditions, it doesn't appear to be too grainy at all.

In low light conditions without a flash, you'll want to lower your shutter speed, raise your ISO and widen your aperture to produce the most amount of light you can. In my photo below, I shot at f/1.4, for 1/25 of a second at ISO800 without a flash.

Metering

This is part of the reason that shooting in a priority mode isn't a problem for me is because I pay strict attention to the metering mode that I'm using. I've written a whole tutorial on metering modes, but I can tell you now, I only ever use 2 modes; Evaluative and Spot. Before I go into detail as to why I use those modes, let's have a look at the two modes I don't use; Partial and Center – Weighted Average. Partial is basically a larger version of spot metering which seems a little pointless to me and Center – Weighted Average is like a less intelligent Evaluative metering mode.

Evaluative is the most complex and modern way of metering that your camera will have. It collects data from across the whole frame and even gives priority to the area that you’re focusing on. The camera will look at a scene and see a really bright area like the sun and take that into account when trying to work out the best exposure – this will reduce the amount of contrast and silhouettes. This has different names for different manufacturers and software, but they all do basically the same t

hing.

Spot metering is like Partial metering, only the dot in the center is smaller, roughly 5% of the frame. This is good for smaller subjects and I personally use it over partial because I know that any light surrounding the subject, won’t be a problem. It’s a more advanced way of working out the exposure for your camera because it’s metering for such a small area; the rest of the scene may not be correct and that leaves it up to you to work it out on your own. I use this when I only want to meter for a small portion of the frame, like when I'm shooting into the sun and don't want the camera to consider lens flare or sun.

White Balance

It's certainly worth mentioning that I only ever shoot in RAW these days so I don't tend to worry about my white balance too much as I can fix it in post with very little work. I leave my camera on AWB which is auto white balance to capture the majority of situations and then I'll fix whatever needs fixing later. I will on occasion switch to Shade or Cloudy, but I find that often the presets aren't accurate enough or the weather changes too quickly.

The only other mode that I use on a regular basis is Tungsten as I spend a lot of time using my camera inside in the evening, such as down the pub. When you're in these sorts of conditions, you'll typically find that the only light source you're dealing with is a tungsten light so it's nice to deal with that then, so that you have less work to do in post. The WB that I use massively depends on the lighting I use so it may be different for you, I just very rarely find myself working with fluorescent light.

When I'm shooting in RAW and working with model, I carry a grey card around my neck and get my model to hold it up to the camera every time the lighting changes, because I can the go into my post production software and use the colour picker to choose it as my neutral grey, which is a lot easier and less time consuming than doing it manually. If you don't understand much of what I'm writing about here, I strongly suggest you go back and read the WB post which has been linked across this page.

Flash

First thing's first, I have not used a pop up flash in years. Don't touch it, just stay away from it and replace your flash with an external unit – the difference is clear. I go into this is much more detail here if you're interested. Looking past that though, I use my external unit is three main ways; fill light, off camera to produce depth, and to light up a room or subject. I almost always try to diffuse the light or bounce it off of something where possible as it makes the light look a lot more natural.

I speak in detail about fill flash in my post on shooting into the sun and my post on fill flash; it's basically a really good way of fighting with digital camera's relatively poor dynamic range. You get to fill in the light where it's needed, and it works even better when you take your flash off your camera.

Off camera flash is another topic I've written in depth about recently, and I use it when I can as it creates a much more realistic look and adds depth to the photo. It can get a little bit hard to balance the weight of my camera and lens in one hand while trying to position the flash with the other, but I make it work where possible. If I'm out on a shoot with a model, it's a lot easier and I bring two flashes with me set up on tripods to make my photos look better.

Lastly, I use the flash to illuminate my subject or bounce the light about a room so that the subject is well lit. If possible, I'll try to bounce the light, but it's not always that simple. The photo below was taken with the flash bounced on the ceiling and that provided enough light for my to set my aperture for f/4.5.