Mother Birthday Gift - Photography

 Digital Photography Exposed

We are going to learn how to creatively use the basic camera controls. Your digital may have unique functions like auto white balance, sepia toning, panorama shooting etc. We are not going to concern ourselves with those functions. Instead, we are going to focus on the most basic of camera settings – settings common to ANY camera ever made.

EXPOSURE:

Exposure is of course a combination of two settings that determine the light levels entering the camera.

Aperture:

The aperture is one of the most important of camera settings. Once again, this deals with the lens. If you have a manual camera, you will see a ring on your lens barrel with numbers such as 4, 5.6, 8, 11 and so on. This is the aperture control. The lens has a diaphragm inside the barrel, which can expand and contract, thereby increasing in diameter and decreasing in diameter. As the diaphragm rearranges itself with every different aperture the hole left in its middle increases and decreases in diameter. It is easy to imagine what affect this has on our image – it is a question of increasing or decreasing the AMOUNT of light entering the camera. Thus the aperture setting has a direct effect of EXPOSURE. Remember that the BIGGER the f NUMBER (f22), the SMALLER is the circumference, or aperture. The SMALLER the value (f1.2), the BIGGER the opening… The lens gives its highest quality at smallest apertures (f11, f16).

A quick note on DOF:

The DOF doesn’t affect exposure; on the other hand it is a by-product of the aperture setting. The Depth Of Field is the range of subjects that fall within the sharp area in your image. 50th birthday gifts example, the area between the nearest sharp object and the furthest sharp object in the image is the DOF. It is a subjective phenomenon. More on that later…for now let us remember that DOF increases with decrease in aperture.

Shutter speed:

The shutter of the camera opens and closes in a fraction of a second (sometimes for many seconds as well), allowing light to enter the camera through the lens for a given 50th birthday gifts of time. The shutter is located somewhere between the lens and the light sensitive surface. So, this determines the TIME for which the light sensitive surface is exposed to light. Consider the two variables that affect exposure –