Taking Better Pictures: Part II 'Photography is Light'
Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2005 2:35 pm
Taking Better Pictures: Part II "Photography is Light"
There it is, I've just summed up in 3 words the whole of what Photography is ALL about! ...Photography is Light!
Ahhh, but how can it be so easy you might ask? Well, it AIN'T! though it seems these days that everybody and their glaucoma-eyed grandmother is buying digicams and taking pictures that seem 'nice', even a monkey will eventually take a 'nice' picture after snapping off a few HUNDRED shots (which is quite easy to do these days that digital makes it FREE to take as many pictures as you want). But it is the person that's got a clue about dealing with Light that's going to come out with results as they WANT (instead of doing a best of 500 kind of thing)
but what do I mean by 'Light'? That's where things get confusing, complicated and frustrating...But the people that have learned to master it are the ones that can make a living from it.
Whether you've got a fully automatic (aka Point-and-shoot) digital camera or a Digital SLR that lets' you control every detail...You (or the camera, in the case of the full auto) are working and adjusting how you take your picture based on the situation of Lighting. The success of taking a 'good' picture is if you've properly compensated and configured your settings for the Lighting situation.
In this installment I'm going to go over some of the details of what it is to deal with 'Light' and the tools you have at your disposal to conquer it. Unfortunately this tutorial is gonna be just about meaningless for anyone that doesn't have manual camera controls though, but it's info that might be of use anyway.
Let's begin...
In essence, when we're dealing with Light it's about compensating for too much or too little of it. So let's first discuss the tools a camera with manual controls gives you to compensate for the situation.
- Shutter Speed
- Aperture
- ISO
- White Balance
While each one of these settings allows you to adjust for more or less light, there's a give-and-take with them each! Here's more detail about that...
Shutter Speed
Shutter Speed allows you to control motion, or rather to capture motion. Depending on how fast or slow your settings are, you might have a blurry picture of a turtle walking or make a hummingbird look perfectly still in-flight. The faster you want to set the shutter though, the more light you'll need!
Aperture
Also called F-Stop. Aperture controls your 'Depth of Field'. Depth of Field can be defined as "amount of space that remains in focus in front of and behind the object you are focusing on." Imagine a portrait of a person where only their eyes are in focus and everything else is out of focus, or imagine a picture of a landscape where it seems EVERYTHING from an inch away all the way to inifity is focused. This is what Aperture settings allow you to do, but the more area you want to be in focus, the more light is needed!
ISO
What the acronym stands for doesn't matter, but how it affects your pictures does. ISO settings come in ranges like 50, 100, 200, 400, etc... In the digital world it works the exact same way as in the Film world, which is to say the higher the number the less light is needed to get a properly exposed shot. Unfortunately the downside here is that the higher the ISO setting the grainier the picture will be.
White Balance
White Balance is your tool for compensating for 'colorcast'. Ever see a picture that looks too yellow or too blue? Results like that are because when you're shooting under certain conditions (like when using the flash, or in flourescent lighting and such) causes the picture to have a disproportionate amount of a certain color. The camera's White Balance settings allows you to compensate for such situations. No real give-take here except if you use the wrong WB setting and still get a wacky hue to your pictures, usually whatever picture enhancing software you use (like Photoshop) will allow you to correct for this.
Alright, so those are the tools available and a little explanation on their strengths and shortcomings. So now you might be thinking; That doesn't seem so bad, I can probably just worry about 1 of the settings and adjust things to my liking from there and learn the others as I need to...HA! You poor FOOL to think that! What if you're at a night football game and want to take action shots of your son/nephew/friend on the field? Alright, so it seems you're going to need at least a speed of 1/500th of a second shutter speed to properly get the action without blur...But it's a NIGHTGAME, so your fast shutter setting results in completely black pictures because you don't have enough light for such a fast shutter speed!
This is what sets the Point-n-Shooters from the Pros. You've got to learn how to INTERACT your tools to get the results you WANT! In the example above, you already know you need the 1/500th shutter so now you go to Aperture setting and set it as wide-open as possible. Well, now you've got proper exposure so that everything isn't all dark anymore...BUT because you had to use such a wide-open aperture, ONLY the football your son/nephew/friend is running with is in focus and EVERYTHING else is out of focus (remember, setting the aperture for more light = less depth of field)! Well, now you've got no choice but to resort to using a higher ISO. So finally you've got a properly focused, action shot and it's exposed properly so as to not be too dark, and even though it's a little grainy you were able to get that shot of the game winning catch!
Now, there's already so much info out there on the Net I'm not going to bother going into all the fine details and all the crazy ass mathematical formulas you can use to figure things out with these settings, but here's a few noteworthy things to keep in mind:
- If you're taking handheld pictures, to compensate for being human and having hands that shake no matter how still you try to be, a general rule of thumb is that you need at least a speed of 1/90th of a second shutter to compensate for hand shake.
- The lowest possible ISO setting is preferrable (for sharpness), but in general an ISO of 200 is considered decent.
I'll wrap this installment here. Learning and getting adjusted to just these items is going to take practice. Start your projects off by figuring out the priority of your settings (like for action shots Shutter Speed is priority, or for product shots you'd want to control what's in focus and what's not so Aperture is priority there.) then go down the line with what you want the other settings to be and that should set you on the way to getting better results. Some cameras will also allow you semi-auto settings, I use this option quite often with my Digital SLR (it's cheating a little bit, but goddamned it I LIKE it!). These settings are usually called Shutter-Priority or Aperture-Priority where you set what Shutter or Aperture you MUST have and let the camera fiddle with the other settings to get proper exposure.
My next piece will go further into the tools available (external tools that is), such as Tripods, Flashes, Light Meters and Lenses with built-in Image Stabilizers.
Over and out (for now).
There it is, I've just summed up in 3 words the whole of what Photography is ALL about! ...Photography is Light!
Ahhh, but how can it be so easy you might ask? Well, it AIN'T! though it seems these days that everybody and their glaucoma-eyed grandmother is buying digicams and taking pictures that seem 'nice', even a monkey will eventually take a 'nice' picture after snapping off a few HUNDRED shots (which is quite easy to do these days that digital makes it FREE to take as many pictures as you want). But it is the person that's got a clue about dealing with Light that's going to come out with results as they WANT (instead of doing a best of 500 kind of thing)
but what do I mean by 'Light'? That's where things get confusing, complicated and frustrating...But the people that have learned to master it are the ones that can make a living from it.
Whether you've got a fully automatic (aka Point-and-shoot) digital camera or a Digital SLR that lets' you control every detail...You (or the camera, in the case of the full auto) are working and adjusting how you take your picture based on the situation of Lighting. The success of taking a 'good' picture is if you've properly compensated and configured your settings for the Lighting situation.
In this installment I'm going to go over some of the details of what it is to deal with 'Light' and the tools you have at your disposal to conquer it. Unfortunately this tutorial is gonna be just about meaningless for anyone that doesn't have manual camera controls though, but it's info that might be of use anyway.
Let's begin...
In essence, when we're dealing with Light it's about compensating for too much or too little of it. So let's first discuss the tools a camera with manual controls gives you to compensate for the situation.
- Shutter Speed
- Aperture
- ISO
- White Balance
While each one of these settings allows you to adjust for more or less light, there's a give-and-take with them each! Here's more detail about that...
Shutter Speed
Shutter Speed allows you to control motion, or rather to capture motion. Depending on how fast or slow your settings are, you might have a blurry picture of a turtle walking or make a hummingbird look perfectly still in-flight. The faster you want to set the shutter though, the more light you'll need!
Aperture
Also called F-Stop. Aperture controls your 'Depth of Field'. Depth of Field can be defined as "amount of space that remains in focus in front of and behind the object you are focusing on." Imagine a portrait of a person where only their eyes are in focus and everything else is out of focus, or imagine a picture of a landscape where it seems EVERYTHING from an inch away all the way to inifity is focused. This is what Aperture settings allow you to do, but the more area you want to be in focus, the more light is needed!
ISO
What the acronym stands for doesn't matter, but how it affects your pictures does. ISO settings come in ranges like 50, 100, 200, 400, etc... In the digital world it works the exact same way as in the Film world, which is to say the higher the number the less light is needed to get a properly exposed shot. Unfortunately the downside here is that the higher the ISO setting the grainier the picture will be.
White Balance
White Balance is your tool for compensating for 'colorcast'. Ever see a picture that looks too yellow or too blue? Results like that are because when you're shooting under certain conditions (like when using the flash, or in flourescent lighting and such) causes the picture to have a disproportionate amount of a certain color. The camera's White Balance settings allows you to compensate for such situations. No real give-take here except if you use the wrong WB setting and still get a wacky hue to your pictures, usually whatever picture enhancing software you use (like Photoshop) will allow you to correct for this.
Alright, so those are the tools available and a little explanation on their strengths and shortcomings. So now you might be thinking; That doesn't seem so bad, I can probably just worry about 1 of the settings and adjust things to my liking from there and learn the others as I need to...HA! You poor FOOL to think that! What if you're at a night football game and want to take action shots of your son/nephew/friend on the field? Alright, so it seems you're going to need at least a speed of 1/500th of a second shutter speed to properly get the action without blur...But it's a NIGHTGAME, so your fast shutter setting results in completely black pictures because you don't have enough light for such a fast shutter speed!
This is what sets the Point-n-Shooters from the Pros. You've got to learn how to INTERACT your tools to get the results you WANT! In the example above, you already know you need the 1/500th shutter so now you go to Aperture setting and set it as wide-open as possible. Well, now you've got proper exposure so that everything isn't all dark anymore...BUT because you had to use such a wide-open aperture, ONLY the football your son/nephew/friend is running with is in focus and EVERYTHING else is out of focus (remember, setting the aperture for more light = less depth of field)! Well, now you've got no choice but to resort to using a higher ISO. So finally you've got a properly focused, action shot and it's exposed properly so as to not be too dark, and even though it's a little grainy you were able to get that shot of the game winning catch!
Now, there's already so much info out there on the Net I'm not going to bother going into all the fine details and all the crazy ass mathematical formulas you can use to figure things out with these settings, but here's a few noteworthy things to keep in mind:
- If you're taking handheld pictures, to compensate for being human and having hands that shake no matter how still you try to be, a general rule of thumb is that you need at least a speed of 1/90th of a second shutter to compensate for hand shake.
- The lowest possible ISO setting is preferrable (for sharpness), but in general an ISO of 200 is considered decent.
I'll wrap this installment here. Learning and getting adjusted to just these items is going to take practice. Start your projects off by figuring out the priority of your settings (like for action shots Shutter Speed is priority, or for product shots you'd want to control what's in focus and what's not so Aperture is priority there.) then go down the line with what you want the other settings to be and that should set you on the way to getting better results. Some cameras will also allow you semi-auto settings, I use this option quite often with my Digital SLR (it's cheating a little bit, but goddamned it I LIKE it!). These settings are usually called Shutter-Priority or Aperture-Priority where you set what Shutter or Aperture you MUST have and let the camera fiddle with the other settings to get proper exposure.
My next piece will go further into the tools available (external tools that is), such as Tripods, Flashes, Light Meters and Lenses with built-in Image Stabilizers.
Over and out (for now).