… for Random Weirdness

Tip #473: 3 Tips for Perfect Exposures

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

Don’t let the camera think for you; let it enable you, instead.

This article first appeared in PetaPixel.com. This is an excerpt.

One of the first things beginning photographers learn is the relationship between ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Known as the “exposure triangle,” this is the basis of the photography world. Here is a short summary of how each component affects your image:

• ISO: The sensitivity of a film, or the base sensitivity (and gain) of a digital camera sensor.
• Aperture: The opening of a lens used to control the amount of light necessary to expose the sensor/film; in addition, the aperture is used creatively to control the compositional use of depth of field.
• Shutter Speed: The length of time of an exposure, usually measured in fractions of a second and sometimes in whole seconds.

Locate your Camera LCD Brightness setting in your menu. Most cameras are set to ‘Auto’ LCD brightness to adapt to the ambient light around you. Setting the brightness manually gives you a more reliable way to judge what you see.

Locate your Highlight Alert function in your camera’s menu system. Highlight alerts are a flashing overlay that can be enabled to alert you when you’ve blown-out highlights and lost that information. This means that if you take a photograph with portions of it so bright that no detail is recorded at all, the portions with the missing detail will flash on the screen.

Locate your Picture Style settings in your camera’s menu system. Your camera will likely default to the ‘Auto’ option and we don’t want that, in fact, none of these picture styles are ideal so we are going to make our own User Setting. You want to make this custom picture style as flat and neutral as possible. I’ve turned the Contrast, Sharpness, and Saturation all the way down to keep the image looking as flat as possible to retain all the information in your image.