If you are a beginner in photography, then we’re very happy you came across our page! We’ll briefly try to share with you some of the most crucial information.
While shooting photos, we always have to deal with the exposure triangle. So what’s an exposure? It’s basically, amount of light that comes to our image sensor. If the settings of our camera are set correctly, then the amount of light will be true to the real scenery.
What is an exposure triangle then?
It’s a relation between 3 parameters: exposure time, aperture and ISO sensitivity. We’ll briefly discuss each of the parameters below.
EXPOSURE TIME
It’s a time of a camera sensor registering the light. We can find wide range of settings in a camera to fit it to any given situation. Choosing the time of 1/120 sec, the camera will register the light exactly in this time.
It’s important to remember that the longer the time, the higher the risk that image won’t be as sharp, it can even get blurred. So, shooting photos with no stand or images in motion, we need to remember to set the exposure time to rather short.
Exposure time is also fun way of experimenting! I think everybody once saw these night lights streaks made with cars! It’s nothing else than the result of long exposure time.
APERTURE
It’s always marked with a symbol ‘f’. What does the aperture actually mean? It’s a component of a camera that is built from so called “leaves”. They create holes that differ in size, depending on what value we set.
Aperture is responsible for the light coming to the sensor, what does this mean? If we decide to set the lower aperture (more opened), there will be more light coming to the sensor and the pictures will get lightened. But if we change aperture value to higher (more closed) then the aperture will get less light and the picture will be darker. In this case, it’s crucial to set the other parameters (like aperture time or ISO), just so the picture brightness would stay the same.
Speaking about the sharpness of a photo, we can mainly say that the aperture is a key factor. The lower the aperture, the less sharp objects will be registered by camera. If we care about the photo being more sharp, we should set the higher aperture. For example, setting the aperture to f/2.8, the photo will be brighter than when setting it to f/16 (assuming that other settings will stay the same).
ISO
ISO value shows us on what level will the sensor be light sensitive. The higher the ISO, the brighter the picture. And vice versa. We need to be careful with ISO setting! Though low values like 100/200/300/400 are recommended, higher values can lead to different create types of image noise. Unfortunately, in this case more of picture details will be lost, colors and contrast will be much lower.
