Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is Exposure?
3. Working with Exposure Settings
4. Conclusion

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why, despite having a decent camera, your photographs don’t come out as well as you want them to be? Or, as is more often the case, some of the photographs that you have clicked look outstandingly professional, while others look very amateurish in comparison? Has it ever happened that you have been able to take a truly awesome picture once but were not able to replicate that success again? If your answer to any of the above questions is yes, then you would greatly benefit from learning about how exposure works in photography. Arming yourself with an understanding of this basic but very important concept would go a long way in helping you become a much better photographer.

What is Exposure?

To put it simply, exposure is the amount of light that the camera is exposed to while taking the photograph. It is what controls how light or dark the clicked picture will appear. This concept is best understood as a triangle whose vertices represent three of the settings available in every camera. These settings are the aperture, the shutter speed, and ISO. These three settings decide the exposure, and working in combination, they determine how well shot a picture will look. Let’s have a look at each of them one by one.

• Aperture: Aperture is a setting that controls how much of the lens’s area is exposed to light, and it is expressed as f-stop values like f/22, f/16, and so on. The higher the f-stop number, the smaller the area of the lens through which the light passes.

• Shutter Speed: This setting determines for how long the camera will be exposed to the light. It is expressed in seconds, such as 1/10 second, 1/30 second, etc. The faster the shutter speed, the shorter the duration for which the light enters the camera.

• ISO: This is the third component of the exposure triangle that regulates the sensitivity of the camera to the light. ISO is expressed in numbers like 100, 200, 400, and so on. The higher number indicates higher sensitivity to light.

Working with Exposure Settings

Now that we know what the three different components that make up the exposure triangle do, let us try to understand how to use them to our advantage. In addition to controlling how light or dark the picture will appear, these settings also have an impact on other aspects of the photograph. What is more important to you in a photograph will determine which of these settings is most important in that particular instance. Let us briefly go through the other attributes that are affected by these settings.

• Depth of Field: You must have seen some stunning photographs where the object in the foreground is really clear and bright, while the background is blurred and unrecognizable. This effect is especially popular for taking photographs, and it is dependent on the aperture setting. The higher the aperture setting, the wider the depth of field, and the more clearly the far-off objects in the background can be captured. Therefore, if you are taking shots of the landscape where you want every single thing to appear clear, you should keep your aperture value high. However, if you want to deliberately blur the background and highlight the object in the front, then this setting needs to be low.

• Motion Blur: Shutter speed plays the most important part while taking photographs of objects that are moving, as this is the setting that controls motion blur. A high shutter speed can freeze the motion, while a slower one will exaggerate the appearance of motion. So, this setting can be used to control how you want to show or hide the movement of your picture’s subject.

• Image Noise: Image noise is the appearance of grain-like particles in the picture, and this happens at higher ISO settings. Sometimes noise is deliberately introduced in the picture due to aesthetic reasons or for creating a certain vintage effect, but in most cases, it is undesirable. Therefore, most photographers prefer to keep their ISO settings at the lowest possible level unless it becomes necessary to increase them due to poor light conditions.

To make it even simpler, we can look at exposure as the ideal amount of light needed to take the perfect photograph. Now this total amount of light needs to be divided between the three different components of the exposure triangle. How this division should be made in the best possible way depends on the environmental conditions at the time of taking the photograph, as well as the intended effects that we are going for. Along with having a fully automatic and a fully manual mode, cameras also have ‘Aperture Priority’ (Av) and ‘Shutter Priority’ (Tv or S) modes. In most cases, you would know which one setting is most important for you for that particular shot. So, you can choose to control that one setting along with the ISO as per your specific needs and let the camera automatically adjust the third one.

Conclusion

The best way to familiarize yourself with how different settings actually play out in real-life scenarios is to simply experiment with different adjustments while clicking your heart out. This has become extremely simpler with the advent of digital cameras, which make it possible to take unlimited pictures without wasting any film as was the case with the older analogue camera. Clicking the same object in the same conditions at different settings will help you understand the intricacies of your camera in more detail. Clicking pictures in different light conditions will help you find out which settings work best in which situations. As these three components work in unison, changing one setting of the exposure triangle impacts the other two, and therefore learning to achieve the right balance in varied situations is going to take some practice and experience.