Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV I'm Mark Wallace and I'm
joined by Agatha and we are going to be
showing you something about Equivalent
Exposures. What the heck is that? Well it
really helps us answer the question of
what settings to use on our camera. Infact
a lot of people have asked me what's the
correct combination of value used? What
shutter speed? What ISO value? What
aperture value is correct? Well the truth
is there are a lot of different
combinations you could use to get a
correct exposure. Now to illustrate this
we're going to have you stand right over
here. I’m going to take a few pictures here.
We're going to start with a really wide
aperture, actually at f1.4 and so, look
right at me beautiful,
so when I do that
my shutter speeds at 1/750 s I'll go to f/4,
I'll take another shot. My shutter speeds
at 1/125 s. I go to f/8 and then my shutter
speed now is at 1/30 s.
I'll take a picture. Now when we put
these three images next to each other
you'll see that their exposures are
almost the same. The same brightness
levels but there are some things that
are going on inside those pictures that
are not the same and that's really how
we determine what settings to use on our
camera because if everything was just
the same, we could just choose whatever,
because when you open up the aperture
that lets in more light, the shutter
speed increases, that restricts things,
that sort of balances things out.
If we close our aperture that lets in less
light. Our shutter speed slows down so
that balances everything out, so that
balance is constantly going on. When
you're changing your shutter speed your
aperture value so if everything looked
the same you could just choose whatever
and it would work but that's not what's
happening here. So let's start by talking
about what the intention of the photo, so
what I want to do is, I want to have a
beautiful portrait of you and so that
means that I'm concentrating on depth of
field. I want the background to fall out
of focus. So how do I do that?
Well I need to use a wide open aperture,
a really small number and so by doing
that I'm going to set my aperture to f1.4
So remember if you're thinking about
depth of field how much is in focus?
The aperture is what you want to start with.
So let me illustrate this to you, so at
f/1.4 look right at me I'm going
focus on your eyes, beautiful, I love that.
So when we look at this notice the
background has fallen completely out of
focus if I would have shot this at f
let's say f/8 same picture I'll look
right at me, beautiful, and now I'll take
a shot. Look at the trees show up
everything in the background is totally
clear, we don't like that so in that
scenario what we want to do is we want
to have a wide open aperture to control
our depth of field, well what is the
shutter doing? The shutter is controlling
motion and so if we really are concerned
about motion, then the shutter is what
we're getting care about not so much the
aperture value, so to illustrate this
what we're going to do is we're first
going to shoot something with a really slow
shutter, so you're going to have to be sort
of crazy in this so I want you to be
whipping your hair around. So now what's
going to happen here when we have a slow
shutter speed, so I'm going to set my
shutter to 1/15 s, so I'm going to
I want you to be a heavy metal rocker so
you're going to move your head around, yeah,
do that and do it again perfect and so
look what's happening here.
Her hair is completely blurred. It's just
like motion and so if you want that
motion, that's awesome. You have a slow
shutter speed this is perfect for
landscape photography, we have water or
if you want to show some motion at night
with Ferris wheels or car lights moving
that kind of stuff? Slow shutters are
fantastic but if you want to freeze
motion? You need a fast shutter speed so
what I'm going to do here is let's set
our shutter speed to,
let's set it to 1/750 s,
so now we're going to do the same thing
before you do let me focus,
okay so now I want you to
be having a bit of rocker
here we go… blam blam yeah good
Alright now you look sort of funny but
we can see that her features are totally
frozen. Her hair is totally perfect so
come back on over her, so that's
the answer really, is when you're looking at
which settings to use, which one is the
right combination of values? Think about
is it the amount of focus, the depth of
field that you want to control? If so
start with your aperture value. If you
want to control the motion, then you want
to start with your shutter speed either
slow or fast and let the camera figure
out the balance between the two.
Now there's a couple of things that you might
want to understand more fully
that is the
Exposure Triangle. I made a whole series
on the exposure triangle and this really
dives a lot deeper into this topic
and so I've included a link to that in the
description of this video and it talks
about some things specifically it also
talks about the ISO values that you
should use and so watch that series
because it's a much broader answer to
this question.
Thanks so much for being a fantastic model
and being a heavy metal
metal head banger for today,
that was awesome
and thank you so much for joining us for
this episode of Exploring Photography
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Thanks again and I'll see you next time.