Over the past few weeks in Exposure 1, Exposure 2 and Exposure 3 I have written about the subject from a theoretical point of view, but how does all that translate to the real world when you are new to photography?
I figure it is worth a practical walkthrough that will help beginners get a handle on shooting with a DSLR, without relying upon the auto functions of their camera to save their bacon.
So here is a simple recipe:
Step 1 – Grab the summary table from Exposure 3. I have added it again below for easy reference:
Step 2 – re-read your camera’s manual so that you know how to set Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO. Get to know these three controls intimately. The sooner you can access them and make a change without thinking about it, the better.
Step 3 – (Using your camera manual again if necessary) set your camera to a “Baseline”group of settings. Some of these are different to what I shoot with, but to get you started as a beginner this is what I recommend:
- Set your camera’s exposure mode to Manual;
- Set you white balance to Auto;
- Set you file type to .jpg (or preferably) .jpg + RAW;
- Set your ISO to 200
- Set your shutter speed to, 1/125th of a second
- Set you aperture to f8
Step 4 – Set the display on the back of your camera so that it show you the histogram, with blinking highlights switched on.
OK, head outside into the sunshine (hopefully where you are – it’s the depths of Melbourne Winter here!) . Pick a subject (anything will do for now), frame it up and take a picture. Once you have done that, check the histogram on the back of the camera.
What does it look like? Is it pushed over to the right hand side of the graph? do you have large areas with blinking highlights? If so there your image is overexposed. Using the table above, think about which setting you might want to change to reduce the amount of light hitting the camera’s sensor. Your options are a faster shutter speed, lower ISO or smaller aperture (higher number).
Let’s say that we decide to leave aperture and shutter speed where they are for, so we drop the ISO one stop from ISO 200 to ISO 100. This will not effect subject motion blur or depth of field, but it should give us a higher quality image with less noise – bonus!
Take another exposure of the same subject. How are the histogram and ‘blinkies’ looking now? If you are still pushed over to the right, you will need to change either shutter speed or aperture. So let’s increase shutter speed by a stop from 1/125th to 1/250th of a second and check the histogram again. Hopefully the histogram is now within the boundaries of the graph, and well dispersed between pure black and pure white, with few or no blinking highlights. Furthermore, when you look at the image on the back of the camera, it should be pleasing to your creative eye.
If it is, then congratulations, you have just taken your first real proper exposure without relying on the camera’s automatic functions to make creative decisions for you. Well done! If not, then you might decide to make more changes to the settings to place the exposure where you want it for the type of image that you are looking to create.
There are many more examples that we could walk through, maybe starting at the other end, with an indoor low light scene and the need to increase exposure, but I think you should be able to get the drift of that by running the opposite actions to above. The most important thing to remember is that photography is a blend of technical and creative trade offs, which is why the summary table above is so valuable.
You’ll need to practice for all of this to sink in a bit, but you’ll get it quicker using manual mode than by letting the camera do everything for you. Next up, we’ll talk a bit about composition.