How to Understand Camera Exposure

Thứ sáu - 26/04/2024 23:11
To be able to do any of the things that you wanted to do when you bought your digital camera, you need to understand exposure. While you are able to take some decent pictures right out of the box, once you have an understanding of...
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To be able to do any of the things that you wanted to do when you bought your digital camera, you need to understand exposure. While you are able to take some decent pictures right out of the box, once you have an understanding of exposure, you will find the pictures that you produce surpass the questionable title of 'snapshots' and become photographs and memories.

Steps

  1. Step 1 Understand  what...
    Understand what "exposure of the image" is and how will it affect your photographs. Exposure is an umbrella term that refers to two aspects of photography – it is referring to how to control the lightness and the darkness of the image.
    • The exposure is controlled by the camera's light meter. The light meter determines what the proper exposure is; it all sets the f-stop and shutter speed. The f-stop is a fraction; the f represents the focal length. The f-stop is determined by dividing the focal length by the aperture. f/2.8 would be 1/2.8 versus f/16 which would be 1/16. If you look at it like slices of a pie, you would get a lot more pie with 1/2.8 than you would with 1/16.
    • This can be very unnerving, but f-stops and shutter speeds on every picture to get the light right or the lightness and darkness and exposure.
    • A good way to understand it is to "think of a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom. If you have a large hole in the bottom of the bucket (large aperture), water will drain out quickly (fast shutter speed). Conversely, for the same amount of water, if you have a small hole in the bottom of the bucket (small aperture), the water will drain out slowly (slow shutter speed)."
    • Exposure or lightness and darkness in the picture is a combination of the f-stop, which is the size of the hole in the lens, and the shutter speed, which is the length of time that the shutter is open. So, if you leave the shutter open longer, you're getting more light to the film or more light to the digital sensor, and the picture gets brighter, or lighter. If you shorten the exposure (give less light to the film or to the digital sensor), the exposure gets darker. Longer shutter speed: more exposure, more light; shorter shutter speed: less exposure, less light.
  2. Step 5 Understand why you would want to change the exposure.
    The aperture is really important to control the picture; it lets in the light, and the light is the most important thing for your picture. Without light, you won't have a picture.
    • Set the aperture to control both the light and the amount that is in focus, in other words, the depth of field.
    • Set a wide opening, like f/2 or 2.8, to blur the background and have your subject razor sharp. Also, you'll probably want to use the largest aperture when shooting in low-light, in order to prevent blur.
    • Shoot a medium aperture, 5.6 or 8 so the subject is sharp and background is slightly out of focus but still recognizable.
    • Shoot at smaller apertures, like f/11 and possibly smaller, for a landscape picture when you want the flowers in the foreground, the river, and the mountains all in focus. Depending on your format, tiny apertures like f/16 and smaller will cause you to lose sharpness due to diffraction effects.
    • For many photographers, the aperture is far more important to achieving great pictures than the shutter speed, because it controls the depth of field of the picture, whereas it's more difficult to tell if a picture was shot at 1/250 or 1/1000 of a second.
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Things You'll Need

  • Digital camera


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