Hi everybody I'm Mark Wallace, in this episode I'm going to explain the
exposure triangle, which is the foundation for everything in photography.
AdoramaTV presents, Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of
Exploring Photography right here
on AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama its the absolute best camera store in the world,
in fact anything you see in our videos you can buy them at
Adorama, check them out at Adorama.com. Well in this episode we're going to be
talking to you about the exposure triangle, it's really the foundation
for everything about photography, once you understand how the exposure triangle works
you're going to be able to make sure you get a great exposure but you're also going to learn how
to take control of all the buttons and dials
on your camera and what they do and why they're there, but you will also get creative control
of your photographs, so you can tell a better story and so that's what the exposure
triangle is
all about. In fact we're going to be spending a few episodes
on the exposure triangle, we're going to break it down piece by piece
so you can really get a handle on all the stuff that it does.
Well when we think about exposure a lot of the times we think about
images being too bright or too dark but there's more to it than that, we can have
images that are noisy or images that are blurry are really nice and crisp,
or images they have lots of stuff in focus or just the one thing that and
focus or
maybe its totally out of focus altogether and the exposure triangle helps us
understand how all of that works together
and the exposure triangle is made of three
things and these three things never change so once you have these down you're going to be
good to go forever
so don't fret it's very, very simple. In the exposure triangle we have the
aperture, the shutter, and ISO
and the three things work together to give us a perfect
exposure. I want to start to explain this by looking at the
aperture, now the aperture is inside your camera lens, in fact if I take this
lens off my camera and we can look at this really close, I can move this
in and out and you can see clearly that the aperture is just this thing that let's
light, more light in or less light in, its growing and shrinking.
So our aperture is in our
lands and I can make it really big or really small by just changing
aperture value. Now our aperture values have numbers like f/22, f/16,
f/11, f/8 and the smaller the number the larger the
opening, and the larger the number the smaller the opening, I know that seems
backwards but that's how it is, f/16 is really small
f/1.4 is really big now it's not important that you know what those
numbers mean right now, we're going to explain that in a future episode
right now it's important to understand that a big number means a small
opening and a small number means a big opening, I guarantee we're going to
make that make sense free in a future episode, but just remember
a big opening means lots of light is coming
through and the small opening means not very much light is coming through so
we've got a big number
not very much light because its a small hole, a small number
means a lot to light is coming through because it's a big opening. Our
aperture controls the quantity of light coming
into our camera so that little thing in our lens it can be open or closed,
its letting a different quantity of light come into
our camera. Well there's another thing in our camera, everyone already I'm sure knows
about this, it's called
the shutter. Now the shutter can go at a really fast speed, in fact we'll look at this
there's the shutter,
BAM, when I turn on my camera it goes
wham really, really fast or I can slow that down
that was at about 4,000th of a second, I can do all way down to 500th of a second even
down to a 30th of a second, and I can get a lot slower, half a second, one second
all the way down to
30 seconds, even a few minutes, so just like the aperture
where it allows lots of light and not very much light, the shutter
does sort of the same thing, with the really fast shutter, not very much light is coming
into our camera, a really slow shutter, lots of light
is coming into our camera. So we've got these two things the aperture
that can let in lots of light or not very much light, and the shutter that can let in lots of light
or not very much light and those two things have to be balanced
on sort of like a scale, so if this on is letting in a lot of light well then this one
needs to restrict so we don't get too much light, or of this one is letting in not
very much light we need open this one up so we get more light,
so there's always a play in those two things trying to
figure out how much light to come in and we're want to talk about how our camera figures
that out
in a little bit. The third thing in our exposure triangle is called
ISO, an ISO controls the sensitivity
of our camera to light. Now there's more to it than that and a lot of those really geeky
guys that know lots of science
are always going to post a comment and say no it's about gain and all this stuff, but it's
really easy to remember
our ISO controls how sensitive our camera is to light
much like our eyes in a dark theater, when we go into a dark theater
at first we can't really see, but as our eyes adjust to the darkness
then we can see just fine we can, but we can't see as well as we can in bright
daylight. The same thing is true of ISO, when you have a low ISO number like 100 or
200
our camera isn't very sensitive to light and so we have to either
open up our aperture really wide or make a slow shutter speed or
have to be a really bright area, a really bright day and as we
increase our ISO our camera becomes more and more sensitive to light
the problem is we also get noise in our images
so there is a penalty for having a high ISO.
So we have those three things, the aperture more and less light,
the shutter more and less light, and the ISO more and less sensitive to light
which is sort of the same thing as more or less light. Getting those three things in
balance
we have something that's built into almost every modern camera
and that's called a meter. Now think about the meter sort of
as a judge, the meter is looking at the settings of our cameras and saying hey if you
set the aperture to this wide
I've got to figure out how fast the shutter speed should be, or if you set the
shutter speed in this fast I've got to figure out how
big or small the aperture should be, so the meter
is judging things for us and something thats very important to note
just because two settings work, or three settings work in one situation
doesn't mean it'll work in a different situation because light is constantly
changing
and that's why we need a meter in our camera.
Alright lets put all of this stuff together, now that we know about
the three things ISO aperture and shutter and the judge
or the meter that's built into our camera, how does all on this
work? Well it's pretty simple, normally
on the exposure triangle you set two things
and our camera figures out the third using its meter
so you'll set either the ISO and the aperture
and the camera will figure out the correct shutter speed or
you'll set the ISO and shutter speed and the camera will figure out the correct
aperture value and it does that using the built-in
light meter. Now the question you're asking me is, well
which one do I start with, do I set the aperture or should I set the shutter?
Well it really depends on the kind of photographer that you are,
traditionally scenic photographers and portrait photographers
are more concerned with the aperture than they are with the shutter
and the reason for that is the aperture helps us control how much of an image
is in focus and scenic photographers want everything in focus, from the front to
the very end so they want a small aperture value and the shutter can do
whatever it wants to do because the camera is on a tripod,
and portrait photographers want sort of the opposite of that. they want a nice clear
image if somebody's face
but they want the background to fall out of focus and the aperture helps us do that so
scenic photographers and portrait photographers
care about the aperture,
while the people that deal with motion, specifically sports photographers
they care about the shutter because the shutter controls motion
it either freezes motion or shows motion because the shutter controls the
the duration of time, how long light comes into a camera,
so if you want to shoot somebody dunking a basketball or a race car or a bicycle going by
you care about your shutter speed and the aperture can do whatever it wants to do
and you're probably still going to be
happy. Thats the beginning point we're going to delve into both of those things in future
episodes
in fact we're going to delve into all of this over a series of episodes,
the next episode we're going to talk about depth of field in the aperture and all the things
that it does and how the aperture affects your lens choices
so you'll learn how to buy the proper lens for your needs, then we're going to talk about the
shutter speeds, we're going to understand stops,
how everything works together we're going to understand metering, we're going to talk about
how the camera
meters light and sometimes it gets it wrong, and we're going to tell you how to get it
right every single time. I'm
going to tell you how to shoot in manual mode using the exposure triangle and a
lot more so stick with us,
we have a lot to come in Exploring Photography over the
few episodes. Well thanks for joining me for this episode of Exploring Photography
and don't forget everything that I'm talking about today you can read more about that
at the Adorama
Learning Center, its absolutely free so check that out and
AdoramaTV is absolutely free so click the subscribe button
because I know you don't want to miss a single episode. Thanks for joining me
this week and I'll see you again next time!
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