What is photography without understanding its principles? That’s like buying a car without knowing what to do for it to move. No matter your perspective about a camera whether you see it as a small box with a hole on it, you still have to master its mechanics to be able to record or take images.
EXPOSURE
This is one determinant of your photograph. Exposure is how much light your shot was able to receive and this reflects on the image produced be it on DSLR or SLR. According to my understanding of photography, it is defined as drawing an image with light. Without light, there won’t be a photograph. This applies to us humans in the sense that we can only see with light but once there’s no light our eyes begin to fail us until there’s a ray of light pointed in our direction.
This exposure is determined by three major principles:
APERTURE
Aperture is majorly called the F-stop which is the opening of light that enters into the image sensor. It is the opening of the diaphragm through which light passes. Aperture is measured in f-stops, for example, f/2.0, f/2.8. f/4.0 etc. The smaller the f-stop number, the larger the lens opening, and therefore the more light a lens can let in. This is why the sharper lenses with lower f-stops are normally more expensive than a similar lens which cannot match the same aperture, as the more expensive lenses can cope with low light situations better. Most times you see some images with a blur background which is called debt of field and this debt of filed is achieved with a lower F-stop say f/1.8, f/2.8 depending on the lens’s aperture metering.
SHUTTER SPEED
If you pay attention mostly to your shutter click you would hear a sound, that’s to tell you the amount of speed at which light enters into the image sensor. This can be changed quite easily and is measured in fractions, i.e. 1/60, 1/125. This number relates to the timing that the shutter is left open, for example, 1/60 shutter speed will mean the shutter stays open for 1 sixtieth of a second. the more you increase your shutter the less amount of light hits your sensor seemingly the more you reduce your shutter, the more light hits your images sensor. Most cameras will have a larger range of varying shutter speeds for the user to work with, from Sonic the Hedgehog like speeds of 1/4000 which is great for capturing moving action such as wildlife or freezing sports events, to long exposures of sometimes over a minute long, perfect for landscape photography or low light photography with a tripod.
ISO
ISO is normally measured from 100, 200, 400, etc. with a low number as possible preferred. This is because the higher ISO that is used, typically the more ‘noise’ you get on an image, where an image is not as sharp as in the lower ISO’s. When you use a higher ISO, you are increasing the sensitivity of the image sensor, so now the sensor captures not just more light incoming, but also more surrounding noise which reduces clarity in your image.
Combining these three amazing principles gives you a mind-blowing result.
