9 Years of Camera Setting Knowledge in 29 Minutes

0:00 Which of these two images is correctly exposed? Okay, this one's kind of a gimme. It's obviously this one on the right here. But what if I add in this image? These all have the same composition, but one of them stands out. This third one has greater sharpness throughout the frame and has a more pleasing blur to the movement of the vehicles. These three images demonstrate the difference between an Incorrect, a Correct, and a Creatively Correct Exposure, and in this video, I'm going to be diving into everything you need to know about exposure as simply as I possibly can, so that you can gain mastery over your camera. But to do that, we're going to need to get out of the studio and go find some dynamic scenes.

0:59 A photograph is often called an exposure. People sometimes use this term when talking about the finished image. But to a photographer, the word has a deeper meaning. Within the photographic context, the term "Exposure" refers to the amount of light that passes through your lens and your camera Shutter, ultimately registering on a photosensitive medium. There are three mechanisms at play when exposing an image. Aperture, Shutter Speed, and Iso. Aperture is most simply defined as the size of your lens's entrance pupil. The more dilated the pupil, the more light enters. After passing through your lens, the light then meets the Shutter of your camera. In its resting state, the shutter remains closed, but when you press the shutter button, it opens and allows light to pass through for

1:44 a brief period of time before closing again. After passing through the Aperture and the Shutter, the light reaches the last factor, Iso. When talking about film, the Iso rating, or box speed, is included in the name. Colorplus 200, Portra 800, Velvia 50, etc. The higher the number, the more sensitive a film is to light. The same principle applies to digital cameras, but they have the advantage of being able to change their Iso at any time. We'll explore the nuances of these three mechanisms in a moment, but for now, all you need to know is that these three factors are at play in every single image you take, whether you are aware of it or not.

2:30 So, for demonstration's sake, I'm going to be shooting on digital today, and I have a frame composed here that I think is going to demonstrate how each of these mechanisms function. So let's pretend for a moment that I know nothing about photography, and I just put my camera in auto and captured this image. At first glance, it looks pretty decent. The highlights and the shadows seem to be sitting in the appropriate places. But let's look at the settings here. So here we can see that the Aperture for this image was F/4. The Shutter Speed was 1/250 of a second. And the Iso was 125. That's okay, but we could do a lot better here. Remember, Aperture is the size of your lens's entrance pupil. The larger the pupil, the more light gets in. But there's more to it than that. Depending on your camera, you control your aperture in different ways.

3:17 On modern digital cameras, it's typically a dial on the camera. But on older film camera lenses, there's usually a physical ring you turn. Under the right conditions, when you adjust the Aperture, you can actually see the blades of the pupil diaphragm opening and closing. The Aperture can seem intimidating at first, with values like F/1.4 or F/ 22. What does that actually mean? Now, this is not necessary information by any means, but if we want to get technical for a minute, An Aperture value, commonly referred to as F-stop, is an equation. "F" refers to the focal length of your lens (like 50mm, 30mm), the slash means divided by, and then the number indicates the stop in use. Basically, what this means is that

4:04 an F-stop is a ratio that refers to the size of the entrance pupil. For example, if we have a 50mm lens and we're shooting at F/2.8, then the size of the pupil is 17.85mm. Now, if we had that same 50 millimeter lens, but we were shooting at F/22, Then the size of the pupil is 2.27mm. Significantly smaller. Right? So which of these is going to let in more light, F/2.8 or F/22? Obviously f 2.8, because the size of the entrance pupil is larger. So the smaller the F-number, the more light passes through the lens. The larger the F-number, the less light passes through the lens. The smaller the F-number, actually means the larger the entrance pupil, more light gets through. The larger the F-number means, the smaller the entrance pupil,

4:52 the less light gets in. So just remember that it's reversed. But the Aperture actually has another effect as well. It determines the range of things that will be in focus in your image. Have you ever wondered how a portrait photographer seems to get razor thin focus on their subject and milky out of focus backgrounds? Or how a landscape photographer seems to get everything in focus? This is how. They bend Aperture to their will. In short, the larger the Aperture, which we know means the smaller the F-number, the more shallow the Depth of Field. The smaller the Aperture, which we know means the larger F-number, the greater things will be in focus. So think of it like this. Smaller number, shallow Depth of Field. Bigger number, greater Depth of Field.

5:38 So, coming back to our image, we can see the image here was shot at F/4, which is neither wide open nor greatly stopped down. The focus is clearly set on this area. But all the other parts of the frame are just a little bit out of focus. Since this is a landscape, I want to make sure there's clarity and sharpness throughout the scene. So to introduce that extra sharpness, all we need to do is close down our Aperture. F/8 to F/11 are typically good f stops for shooting landscape imagery. They close the aperture down just enough to sharpen the foreground and the background without stopping down so far that the depth of field starts to encompass the front of the lens, bringing all the dust on your lens into focus as well. All right, so now I'm going to change the camera over to manual. But I'm going to put the same settings in that we had before,

6:24 which is 1/250 of a second at F/4, Iso 125. But now I'm going to increase our Aperture to F/11 And if we go ahead and take that photo now, well, we can see that there's something terribly wrong here. We've successfully increased our depth of field. But now the image is dark. So when we first shot this image in auto, the camera just chose some settings that would indicate a correct exposure. It wasn't concerned with depth of field or anything like that. And it did fine. But when we changed the Aperture from F/4 to F/11, we took away a bunch of light but we didn't add any back with the other two mechanisms at play here. And so now we can begin to see the interconnected nature of all of these things. These three factors, together,

7:10 their interconnected nature is often referred to as the Exposure Triangle. Because when changing one of them, if you want to maintain that exposure, you have to make up for it with one or both of the other two factors at play here. Okay, so our image is dark. Now, how do we know how much to compensate for? How do we know how much light to add to make up for the light that we just took away? Now, the easy answer to this is, well, you just look through your EVF or your viewfinder, and then you just change one of the settings until it indicates the correct exposure again. And that's not wrong. But let me explain this a little bit more elegantly. And to do that, we're going to have to discuss Stops.

7:55 If you double the amount of light that enters your camera, then you've increased your exposure by one stop. And if you cut that amount of light in half, you've decreased it by one stop. For example, if you're shooting an image with a Shutter Speed of 1/60 of a second and you increase your Shutter Speed to 1/125 of a second, you've decreased the amount of light entering your camera by half, and as such, you've decreased your exposure one stop. Conversely, if you also started at 1/60 of a second, but then you slowed your Shutter Speed to 1/30 of a second, you would have essentially doubled the amount of time your shutter was open, letting in twice the amount of light, and you would have increased your exposure one stop. The same rule applies here for Iso. ColorPlus 200 is one stop less sensitive to light than Portra 400, but Colorplus 200 is

8:42 one stop more sensitive than Ektar 100. With Aperture, you might have guessed that, yes, this is slightly more complicated, because as you now know, the F-number refers to the proportionate size of the lens's entrance pupil to its focal length. Don't worry about that. Just know that on film camera lenses, your F-stops are already laid out in full stops. And on digital cameras, one tick of the Aperture dial is typically a third of a stop. If you're feeling ambitious and you want to study these full stops as you see them on the screen now, they, along with all of the core concepts and things that we discuss in this video, will be included in a free cheat sheet, downloadable in the description. I'll remind you about it again at the end of the video, if you're curious. All right, so back to our image. So, since we closed our Aperture down three stops,

9:30 we need to make up that exposure from somewhere else, either our Iso or our Shutter Speed. So why don't we just take it from the Iso? So we would have to do an increase of three stops. And we know that Iso, the higher the number, the greater the sensitivity. So if we're at 125, we could go up to roughly 200, and then that would be a one stop increase, to 400 would be another stop, and then to 800 would be the third stop. And if we take the photo. And so now we've got our correct exposure back. But if we look closely at the image, something else has come into play here. So if we compare our original image at Iso 125 with the image that's shot at Iso 800, we'll see that there's more grain in the Iso 800 version, and that's a consequence of shooting at a higher Iso

10:16 on both digital and analog cameras. The higher the Iso, the more grain. On digital cameras, the Iso is actually the gain, the electrical current that's run through the sensor. The more amplification, the more gain, the more noise. Now, though, film cameras don't have this gain, the more sensitive that the film is, the more likely it is to have grain. Now, on digital cameras, digital noise is not particularly pleasing. So ideally what we would do is we would shoot at our Base Iso. Our Base Iso is usually the lowest Iso, and it is defined as the Iso at which the sensor is performing at its best. So on this camera, that's 125. So if we want to clean up the image as much as possible,

11:03 we're going to have to go back down to 125, which means that if we want to brighten our image back up, unless we can somehow make the sun three stops brighter, we're going to have to go to our Shutter Speed. So we're at 1/250th of a second. So if we're going to increase our exposure by three stops, then that means we have to lengthen that three times. So what's twice as long as 1/250th? 125th. And then again 1/60th, and then once more, 1/30th of a second. So if we go down to 1/30th of a second and we take our photo, now we have an image with a Base Iso where we want it, the Aperture where we want it, and it's correctly exposed. However, we can now see that the Shutter Speed has altered the quality of the water.

11:52 When we first shot this image at 1/250th of a second, the water appeared frozen in time. But in our new image, the water appears much streakier. The motion is more apparent. And that's because 1/250th of a second is quite fast relative to the speed of the water. It doesn't really have much time to move in that period. But 1/30th of a second is a much slower Shutter Speed, and as such, the water has time to move. This is precisely how photographers capture images of soft water or light trails. By leaving the shutter open for longer periods of time, you can introduce a blurred or streaking quality to the movement in your frame. Obviously, the longer the shutter is open, the more pronounced the effect becomes. So what if we wanted to get that soft water right here, right now?

12:39 Well, if we want to keep our Aperture right where it is, and we want to leave our Iso at its base for the cleanest possible image, then it appears that our hands are tied in terms of Shutter Speed. The only two other elements of The Exposure Triangle that we would be able to move in order to compensate for lengthening our Shutter Speed are already spoken for. Now, this is where Neutral Density Filters come in. Neutral Density Filters, or NDs, are filters that you put in front of your lens in order to decrease the amount of light that enters it. For demonstrations purposes, I'm going to be using a Variable Neutral Density Filter, which is basically two polarizing filters stacked on top of each other, that when rotated, allow you to decrease the amount of light that passes through. This particular model is the Freewell K2 system.

13:27 So now that we have the VND on here, we can really dial in the Shutter Speed length that we want for our soft water. So let's play with a couple of different options. So I shot a variety of images from 1 second up to 10 seconds. So let's just examine the two on the outer edges, the one and the 10. They don't look too different, but the 10 is definitely softer. The one retains a little bit more of the definition, and I think for that reason it's my preference. You might prefer the 10, and that's fine. That's what's beautiful about this. There are a seemingly endless combination of Shutter Speeds, Apertures, and Iso settings that can be used to shoot the same image. The mastery is in how you choose. This is what's meant by the Creatively Correct Exposure. It's easy to shoot a correct exposure,

14:14 but it's the careful deliberation that sets the two apart. What film should I load in my camera, given what I plan to shoot? How much Depth of Field do I want in this image? Is there Motion I need to be aware of? And if so, how do I want that to register when I take the photo? As a photographer, these are the questions you should be asking yourself if you want to gain mastery over exposure. And now, armed with this information, you have all the tools to do so. So let's go find a few more examples and I'll show you how to get your toes wet shooting Manual without actually shooting Manual.

15:12 So, this is some different scenery. So let's say we wanted to get a photograph of the mountains off in the distance. Just zoom in and just get the mountains, right? This is an example of a photograph where nearly everything we talked about doesn't matter. The mountains are far off in the distance, and there's not really any foreground elements that we need to be aware of. So F/22 is going to look very similar to F/2.8. There isn't really any Motion that we need to take into consideration either. And since we're probably just going to shoot the film that's already in our camera or shoot at our Base Iso for the cleanest image, it seems like there's not really much creative license we can take with our settings here. But what if instead we walked over here and we wanted to get a photograph of Mount Jefferson in the background with some of the fun foreground elements that we have over here?

15:57 Maybe like the van or the tree or the fire. Well, now we have an opportunity to flex our Creatively Correct Exposure muscle. Now, we could go through that whole song and dance again where we put it in auto and then we subtract light from here and then we add it back over there. But there's an easier solution here for us to get the same results and do less work. And what I'm talking about is Priority Modes. So imagine fully Automatic exists on this end of the spectrum, and fully Manual exists on this end of the spectrum. Well, if that's the case, then Priority Modes exist in the center. They allow you to choose which area of the Exposure Triangle you want to optimize for. Aperture or Shutter Speed? Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority.

16:43 So there's not a whole lot of motion out in this scenery that I need to compensate for. So the variable that I want to control for is Aperture, because my Depth of Field is something that I want to play with. So I can just put my camera into Aperture Priority mode and choose what Aperture that I want to use and then the camera is going to do the rest. So let's say I want to get a photograph of Mount Jefferson with the trees right there. And I want to make sure that they're both in focus. So I'm going to shoot, let's say F/11. And since there's an abundance of light, I'm going to keep my Iso at its base of 125. When I go to frame up my image, the camera, because I'm in Aperture Priority mode, it tells me what Shutter Speed it's going to use to give me the desired exposure. So I'm at F/11, I'm at my base and I go to take the photo and it says a Shutter Speed of 1/160th of a second.

17:32 And boom, correct exposure with the Depth of Field I want, with the Iso I want. And the Shutter Speed is kind of irrelevant because there's so much light out here. Now, as I just said, I kept my Iso at its base, but if it were dark outside and I needed a little bit more juice, then what I could do is I could put my Iso in auto and then the camera would take the aperture that I gave it, and then it would adapt with the Iso and the Shutter Speed to give me my desired exposure. On the other side of the coin, Shutter Priority. Let's say that I wanted to shoot a photograph of Slater running, and I wanted to make sure that he was nice and sharp and he wasn't blurry. Well, I could put the camera in Shutter Priority and I could set the Shutter Speed to something fast, like 1/500th of a second or, hell, even 1/8000th of a second. And then the camera would say, okay, all right, so this is how much light there is,

18:21 this is the Shutter Speed he wants to use, these are the Aperture and Iso settings we need to use to give him the desired result. So, the reason why Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority are such great tools is because in most scenarios where you're shooting, one of those two is going to be the dominant variable you want to control for. It's usually Motion or it's Depth of Field. Obviously, there are situations where you need to control for both, like for example, when we were just at the waterfall. But the great thing about this is that you don't have to do it all the time. But it's a great learning tool because I can set my Aperture or my Shutter Speed, and then I can view how the camera compensates because it's always going to tell me, all right, we're going to shoot this Shutter Speed for the Aperture that you've chosen.

19:07 Or we're going to shoot this Aperture for the Shutter Speed that you've chosen. And by observing the way that the camera calculates, you can begin to slowly pick up on how you would shoot things manually. It's just like riding a bike with the training wheels on for a little bit. And it's fun because you get the same results with less work. So let's shoot a couple of more images. All right, so here I want to get a photograph of these logs. I think I want to shoot this one F/4. Still in Aperture Priority, still at my Base Iso. And the camera says it's going to use a Shutter Speed of 1/164th of a second. Now, if I wanted to see all the scenery, all I got to do is stop down. Let's go back to F/11. And it says it's going to shoot at 1/80th of a second. And the options are limitless. It really just depends on what you're going for.

19:54 I like the shallow Depth of Field in that one, and I think I'm going to shoot a few more like that. I like the way that the van looks here with the trees in the foreground and the mountains in the background. I want to try and get as shallow Depth of Field as possible on the van so that I can kind of like make the mountains nice and soft. Now, the lens that I'm shooting on, granted us only an F/4. If I had something like an F/2.8 or a 1.8 or something like that, then the effect would obviously be more pronounced. But let's see what we can do. So again, I got my camera at F/4. And it says for this Exposure, we need to be shooting at 1/500th of a second. But since we're in Aperture Priority, the camera is taking care of that for me. Same thing with this one. I'm going to go for maximum shallow Depth of Field.

20:39 Shutter Speed says 1/500th of a second again. And just for comparison, let's go down to, let's say F/8. Shoot the same photo again. And we can see the difference in the depth of field right there. All right, so I'm going to try something here. And I don't know how well it's going to work. But I'm going to try and shoot one of those, you know, those super trendy photos where it's like a mountain in the background and the mountain's in focus, but then there's somebody standing in front of it and they're kind of blurry. I'm going to see if I can do that. I don't really know if I have the right lens for this because I got the kit lens. But we're going to try. And I'm going to zoom in as much as possible. Depth of Field gets compounded by how zoomed in you are,

21:26 and how much distance is in between the subject and the out of focus area. I'm putting the camera in manual focus. I'm doing self timer of 10 seconds. And I'm going to go stand in front of it and see if I'm out of focus. It would be a lot cooler if the light was better, if I had a shallower lens, and if I was, I don't know, maybe a more trendy looking person. Okay, now let's do this. We're going to try this again, but we're going to go landscape. We're going to zoom in all the way. We're going to set our focus to the mountain. Make sure our Aperture is at its widest setting. Walk out in front again. That just looks like a blurry man. Oh, I got an idea. What if I turn around? Here we go

22:13 This way, the sun will be on my face. Okay, that's better. Let's try one more time. I'm going to be centered in the frame this time. Like right here. I'm no Instagram model, but you get the concept that I'm trying to convey here, right? By now, this should probably be getting kind of boring to you because it's that simple. I want all these trees in focus. So we'll go F/11, says Shutter Speed 1/100th of a second. We're going for license plate and firewood and we want slightly out of focus firewood. So we're going to have F/4 focus, 1/500th of a second. And just for fun, we'll get one zoomed out. This one is also going to be F/4, 1/500th of a second.

22:58 We'll shoot one at F/11 just for fun. 1/60th of a second. I'm back over here because Mount Jefferson kind of just looks like it's floating in the smoke. It's like an island. And we want all of it in focus. F/11, Shutter Speed says 1/125th of a second. How about this? I want to isolate you guys from the background. So we're going to go F/4. Okay, so there's one more example I want to run through with you guys. One more place we got to go.

24:19 So it's getting late and the light is fading. But before it does, I want to get a photograph of the riverbend. All day we've been shooting with an abundance of light, but now that's not really the case. So we're going to need to adjust our approach a little bit. So since this is a landscape, I want to shoot with a smaller Aperture to get that nice deep Depth of Field. So I'm in Aperture Priority right now. I have my Aperture at F/11, and I have my Iso at 125 to reduce the amount of noise as much as possible. And with these settings, the camera is saying that I need to shoot with a Shutter Speed of 3 seconds. So let's go ahead and see how that looks. And would you look at that? It's blurry. It's blurry because I'm shooting handheld with a Shutter Speed that's too slow. As a general rule, Shutter Speeds 1/60th of a second or faster

25:08 are usually okay for shooting handheld. But one 1/30th of a second and slower are likely to introduce motion blur. The likelihood of blurriness only increases as the Shutter gets longer because as we saw with the waterfall, the longer the Shutter is open, the more time the camera has to capture motion. Now, that can be the motion of things within the frame, or it can be the motion of the camera itself. So instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch this into manual and I'm going to keep my Aperture at F/11. I'm going to put my Shutter Speed at 1/60th of a second. That way I'm still going to be able to have the Depth of Field that I want, but I'm going to be shooting fast enough to remain handheld. Now, with these settings, the camera wants us to shoot with an Iso around . . . 12,800.

25:54 So 12,800 is pretty high, the image is pretty grainy, but the Shutter Speed is fast enough to be shooting handheld and the Depth of Field is still there. But what if we were shooting film, right? Because with film you can't just change your Iso on the fly mid roll. So in this situation, we'd have a couple of options. Quit photography altogether, open our Aperture to let light in, but compromise our Depth of Field. Or put the camera on a tripod and change our Shutter Speed to match. I like photography and I like my Depth of Field right where it is. So, I'm going to go ahead and go with the tripod. So now that we're on a tripod, I can show you the photograph that I really want to get. So because the camera is now locked off, we can shoot as long of an exposure as we want without having to worry about camera shake.

26:41 It's getting dark, the lights are coming out, and this is a great opportunity to shoot some light trails. So let's say I want to go for maximum light streakage. So normally the longest Shutter Speed you can shoot on a camera natively is 30 seconds. So let's set the camera to 30 seconds, and I'm going to set my Iso to 125 to compensate for how long the Shutter is going to be open. And it looks like with that combination, the camera is saying that we're going to shoot at F/11 for our Aperture. So that works out quite nicely. So, I don't have to bring the Iso up to compensate for that. So we're just going to set our self timer to 2 seconds so that I can trigger this without actually introducing any motion blur to the camera when I hit the shutter button. And I'm just going to make sure that we are in focus properly.

27:28 And now all I have to do is wait for some cars, which should not take very long. And just like that, we have created a very intentional photograph. We've considered all elements of The Exposure Triangle and intentionally chose our settings to get the particular result we were looking for. Now, sure, we could have shot this on auto and maybe it would have been fine, but it wouldn't have yielded the same result. And that is what is meant by the Creatively Correct Exposure. Not only is our image correctly exposed, but you, as the photographer, exercised your creativity in deliberately choosing how you wanted to capture it. I will admit, Aperture, Shutter Speed, and Iso are not the sexiest things about photography. It's way more exciting to overedit your image or use AI to replace your sky. But these are the fundamentals.

28:14 These are literally the foundations of photography. And so often they're overlooked. Maybe because people think that they're too boring or too complicated, or perhaps because your camera is capable of making a decision for you. But as we saw, though your camera is capable of making a decision, it's not smart enough to make the best decision. It does not have creative problem-solving abilities but you do. So use them. Combine technical understanding with creativity and you will never have to worry about finding your style. It will find you. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you found this video helpful. Until next time, peace.