Today, I'm not just going to teach you what shutter speed, aperture, and ISO do -
although that is where we're gonna start. More importantly, by the end of this
video, I'm going to teach you my exact system, start to finish, to pick the
*correct* shutter speed, aperture, and ISO every time. These are the most important
camera settings in photography... so pay attention!
Let's start with this box that has a hole in it. It is the basis of all
photography. Once we put something like a film at the back of this box which is
sensitive to light, we have a camera. It's the simplest camera you can have. But
from this incredibly minimalist camera, we can learn a surprising amount about
camera settings. And mastering those three - shutter speed, aperture, and ISO -
depends on having a really deep intuition of how they work. And to start,
the big question you should ask yourself is: How bright will your photo be? One
part of that is just the brightness of the outside world. We call this the
ambient light. And, sometimes, you can change the ambient light by adding a
flash, or you can filter the ambient light by putting sunglasses on your
camera. (Or, if you want to be professional about it, you could use something
like this filter instead!) But a lot of times, you'll just have to deal with the
amount of light that's already there. So, what can we change about the camera
itself to capture more or less light? Well, first you can just change how long
you're taking the picture. If I cover up the hole, and then I let it open, and then
I cover it up again... that was roughly two seconds where the film was exposed to
the outside world. If I had exposed it for longer, the photo would be brighter,
because I literally capture more light. Now, real cameras don't have tiny people
that cover the lens. Instead, they have something called a shutter that's in
front of the film itself (or, of course, in front of the digital camera sensor). And
that's why we call the length of your exposure your "shutter speed." In this
example, my shutter speed was two seconds. But on an actual camera, you have a huge
range of shutter speeds. The one that I'm filming with right now
shoots everything from 30 seconds at the long end to a rapid-fire 1/8000th
of a second. And it's not just about capturing light. Shutter speed also
affects how much motion you capture. If I've got a two second shutter speed, like
I just showed, and someone walks through the photo, there's no way that they're
going to be sharp. They'll kind of look like this. And forget moving subjects.
Even hand-holding your camera can make a photo blurry. If too many of your
pictures look like this... shutter speed is the reason
why. Because if you're taking a two-second long photo, like I talked
about a moment ago, it's pretty much impossible to hold your hands perfectly
steady for two seconds. If you've got a typical lens, you might need 1/30th
of a second, or one 50th instead - maybe even faster - just to get a
sharp photo. Okay, we've got shutter speed out of the way. Let's take another look
at this camera. There's still one more obvious way to capture a brighter photo,
and that is to make this hole larger. Any time that the area doubles, you're
also doubling the amount of light that you capture. And, of course, that leads to
a brighter photo. And this hole is something that exists in every camera
lens - we call it the aperture. I've got a lens
right here, and perhaps you can see that I'm changing the size of the aperture.
And, just like shutter speed, aperture carries along some side effects. It
doesn't just control how much light you capture; it also changes something called
"depth of field." Now, what is depth of field? Well, it's all about how much of
your photo is sharp from front to back. If you've ever seen photos with dreamy,
blurry, out-of-focus backgrounds, aperture is probably the reason why. And the
larger the aperture, the larger the blur in the background. Now, those are the only
three ways to capture more light. First, ambient brightness, and then shutter
speed and aperture. But what if your photo is still too dark? That's gonna be
pretty common with some types of photography. And in that case, what you
can do is increase the sensitivity of your film - or, the closest digital camera
equivalent, which is called "ISO." Now, something similar would be opening
your dark picture in Photoshop, and then bumping up the brightness. Of course, when
you do any of those, your photo is gonna start to look something like this... very
grainy. (Although this is exaggerating things a bit!) Because you're not actually
capturing more light. It's kind of like getting background static on a
microphone that you've turned up really high. So, now you've got all the
background knowledge. It's time to explain my complete system of choosing
the perfect shutter speed, aperture, and ISO every time. And the best way to do
that is to look at some example photos. I'll start with this one... and here are
the camera settings that I used for it. This might look like a difficult photo
to take, but my settings here were really easy. So, first, I always work backwards
and start with ISO. By default, I set it to ISO 100, which is the lowest on my
camera. And I do this because - remember - with ISO you're not actually capturing
more light. You'll get cleaner photos if you set a
low ISO and brighten your photo with shutter speed and aperture instead. So,
the next step is aperture. I think of this as the most important camera
setting, because it affects depth of field - and depth of field has a huge
creative impact on the appearance of your photo. And here, I wanted to isolate
my subject with a nice, blurry background, so I used the largest aperture on my
lens. remember, the largest opening means the
most blur in the background. And on this lens, the largest aperture happened to be
f/4. So, the next step was just to pick a shutter speed that gave me the right
brightness. Here, that turned out to be 1/250th of a second.
And in this case, that was great, because it was fast enough to get rid of
motion blur. Maybe if the Puffin had been flying, the photo would've been blurry at
1/250th of a second. But, instead, it's just standing there, and
my photo is completely sharp. So, this was an easy one because I got to use exactly
the settings I wanted. And now, let's look at a similar, but slightly more
complicated example. I took this dragonfly photo at 1/400th of
a second, f/4, ISO 280. And we'll work backwards again from ISO. Once again, at
first I set it to the lowest value - ISO 100. Then, I move to aperture. I still want
a large amount of blur in the background, so I'm going to use a large aperture. In
this case, f/4 once again. And finally, I moved to shutter speed. Here, I would have
gotten the proper exposure at 1/150th of a second. So why
didn't I use that shutter speed? Motion blur! This dragonfly was on a flower that
was moving in the wind, and close-up photography is already magnifying any
camera shake in the first place. So, in order to get a sharp photo here, I needed
to use a faster shutter speed. Specifically, 1/400th of a
second. That had a ripple effect. And this is
also where the "system" comes into play. It's kind of like a zig-zag. I've done
ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. And now I need to double back. So, back to aperture.
I'd rather not change my aperture here, because I'm happy with my depth of field.
So, I'm keeping it at f/4. And that brings us back to ISO. My photo is too dark
with the settings I've got right now, so I have no choice but to bump up the ISO.
That's not ideal, and it is true that there's a little bit more grain in this
photo if you zoom all the way in, but it's much better than capturing motion
blur or the wrong depth of field, and ruining the shot.
Now let's look at a completely different picture. This time, a landscape photo. And again, I started with
ISO 100, because it's the base ISO on my camera. But then I needed a huge depth of
field to capture this photo. It's not at all like the previous examples, where I
wanted a blurry background. So in this case, I used a really small aperture: f/16.
And this is where I do a side note. Because if you've been paying attention
you probably just heard me say that f/16 is a small aperture. And, earlier, I was
saying that f/4 is a large aperture. And those are both true. What a lot of people
don't understand about aperture is that it's written as a fraction. If you have
1/4 cup of salt, that's a pretty large amount of salt. And if you have 1/16
cup of salt, that's much smaller. Aperture is the exact same way.
f/4 is pretty large. f/16 is pretty small. So, jumping back to the photo, I've got a
low ISO and a small aperture of f/16 to get maximum depth of field. So now I just
need whatever shutter speed gives me the proper exposure. In this ambient light,
that happens to be 1/60th of a second. And because nothing in the photo
is moving, and I was shooting from a tripod, I'm not really at risk of motion
blur. So, those are my final settings. And here's another picture, this time a
cityscape. I did the same thing as before. ISO 100 to start, and then depth of field.
It wasn't really an issue here, because no matter what you do, you can't really
get that shallow a depth of field when everything is so far away. So, I just
set a medium aperture: f/7.1. That's a good balance, because medium apertures
tend to be a little sharper than the ones at the extreme. It's not normally a
big - deal depth of field is way more important - but when everything's in the
distance anyway, you might as well set one of those medium aperture values. And
then it was down to shutter speed. As you can tell, it's after sunset when I took
this photo. And in order to get the right brightness, I needed a pretty long
shutter speed. In this case, exactly one second. Now, if I held my camera while
taking this picture, the photo would have been pretty blurry up close, because I
can't keep my hands completely steady for a full second. But I was using a
tripod, which gives you so much more flexibility in your shutter speed. So, the
photo at one second is incredibly sharp. Although you might notice that some of
the ships in the background are blurry, because they moved during the exposure.
It doesn't really bother me here, because they're not the main subject, but that is
the way that things are gonna be when your shutter speed gets too long.
Next let's take a look at a picture that was very complicated to set properly:
this wildlife photo. And maybe you can start to see some of the difficulties
just by looking at it. It's not too bright out, my subjects are moving pretty
fast, and I want a lot of depth of field. No out-of-focus backgrounds here, because
I really like the iceberg in the distance. So let's work through the
process again. Start at ISO 100, and then set your aperture to whatever you need
in order to get the right depth of field. Here - unfortunately, in a way - I need a lot
of depth of field. So I'm going to set f/16. Now, why is this unfortunate? Well,
f/16 is a very small aperture - again, like 1/16th of a cup of salt. I do get
a lot of depth of field, which is nice, but the opening in the lens just is very
small and does not let in very much light. And now we're on to shutter speed.
In order to get the proper brightness here, I would need 1/50th of a
second exposure. But that's just not gonna work. The birds are flying way too
fast. In fact, they're flying so fast that I had to set 1/400th of a
second, and even that barely worked. When I zoom in,
you can see that the bird on the right actually has a little bit of motion blur
in the wing. Not enough to really mess up the photo, but clearly 1/400th
of a second was the absolute longest exposure that I could have used
here. So, I had to cycle back. I can't really change aperture, because I need
that depth of field. So, I'm leaving it at f/16. And then ISO is the only one left. I
have no choice here but to bump up the ISO to 800. Otherwise, my photo is just
too dark. Now, I *could* take a photo that's really dark and brighten it in Photoshop -
but you tend to get better image quality when you use ISO instead. And those are
my final camera settings! Here, you'll notice if I zoom in that there's
definitely some grain and discolored pixels. But that's a side effect I have
to live with. The only way to fix it would have been with a longer shutter
speed or a wider aperture, and both of those carried consequences that I just
wasn't willing to accept. So, let's wrap things up with a Milky Way photo, because
these are not easy to take, and a lot of people want to know how to do it. Here's
the photo in question. We're going to go through the same process. Start with ISO
100, then move to aperture. Now, everything here is somewhat far away from my camera.
I'd probably want a medium aperture, maybe leaning toward a small aperture
for depth of field. Let's say, f/8. And now we're on to shutter speed. One thing
that's important for Milky Way photography is that the stars are moving
across the sky. It's not something that's easy to notice with the naked eye, but
with a camera, anything longer than twenty or thirty seconds and you'll
actually get blurry stars in your photo. And it does depend on your lens, and also
the direction that you're facing, so you should definitely take some test photos.
Here, the absolute longest I could get away with was 25 seconds. That's a
problem, because at 25 seconds, f/8, and ISO 100, the photo would've looked
something like this. Not ideal. So, let's keep going through the process. I'll skip
aperture again and leave it at f/8 because I really want that depth of
field. Time to bump up my ISO. But it turns out that in this case I would have
needed an ISO of 25,600 just to get a bright enough
photo! That is not a good recipe for good image quality. Here's a photo that I took
in the past at ISO 25,600. So, what's left? There's hardly any ambient light here.
I've maxed out my shutter speed. A flash certainly won't light up the stars
because... they're stars. So, the only thing left is to use a wider aperture so that
I can capture more light. And that's exactly what I did. I used the widest
aperture on my lens - f/2.8, in this case. I don't love doing that for landscape
photography, because you do lose depth of field. But it was my only option here. So
that leaves 25 seconds, f/2.8, and then I get a well-exposed photo at ISO 3200. And
those are my final settings. It's still a pretty high ISO, and we can definitely
see some grain when I zoom in. On top of that, take a look at this area of the
bridge. It's definitely out of focus, thanks to my aperture. And there's no way
around that. But, you know... if you look at the photo as a whole, it's sharp.
Surprisingly sharp, considering that it's the Milky Way I'm photographing. I did
have to compromise on ISO and depth of field, and that's not ideal,
but it also doesn't ruin the photo. So let's go back one last time to the
"system." I've already demonstrated how it works, but let me explain the actual
steps involved. Now, you start with ISO. Set the base ISO on your camera. For most
cameras, that's ISO 100. Next, go to aperture. Set whatever aperture gives you
the right depth of field. Whether you want a shallow focus effect or a huge
depth of field, this is where you'll pick it. Then, go to shutter speed. Set the
value that just gives you a proper exposure. And that does depend on the
ambient light, but a lot of times you'll be done after this step. The exception is
if you're getting motion blur at that shutter speed. If you don't want motion
blur, you have to set a faster shutter speed - but now your photo is going to be
too dark! So, the final step is to get back that brightness. You *could* just
change the ambient light if you have control over it, but normally this boils
down to using a higher ISO, or potentially a larger aperture. Each one
has a compromise, as I've shown. I personally tend to
start with ISO because I'm very picky about my depth of field, and I'd rather
keep the same aperture. But, as I showed in the Milky Way photo, sometimes that
just won't be possible. And there's the system! Five steps. I have yet to come
across a subject that this doesn't work for. It's also a lot quicker in practice
than what I'm talking about it here. If you're just shooting one type of subject,
you can probably use the same aperture, and potentially the same ISO, for a bunch
of photos in a row. You can even let the camera automatically float your shutter
speed to the right exposure, and that makes this system almost too quick! Now,
I've added a couple of related links below the video,
but regardless, by now, you've got the groundwork. Shutter speed, aperture, and
ISO are more important than any other settings in photography, and this is a
system that won't let you down.