How to Set Proper Exposure | Camera Basics
Introduction
Have you ever wondered how you can take great photos? Well, today I’m going to show you how to do that using the exposure triangle.
Keep in mind, this can also apply to video too. Also, I will add a cheat sheet in the description that you can download for free for your reference.
So, What is the Exposure Triangle?
Well, it’s made up of 3 things: Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.
Aperture
Shutter Speed
ISO
Aperture
The first thing and arguably the most important thing is the Aperture. Aperture controls how much light is let into your camera. It is measured in F-stops. You know the little numbers that say f 2.8 or f 3.5 and so on, yeah that’s aperture:
The lower the F-Stop, the more light can be let into your camera which is great for low light situations:
Aperture also affects background blur. Lower aperture means more background blur which is good for portraits:
And higher aperture means more things will be in focus which is good for landscapes:
Thus, this is the first setting I change when exposing for my image.
Shutter Speed
The next thing is shutter speed. This controls how fast or slow the shutter opens or closes. In other words, how fast or slow the camera takes the photo. The faster the shutter speed, the less motion blur there will be. For example for fast moving subjects, you want a high shutter speed so that when you take the photo, the subject won’t be blurry. Think of it as stopping the action:
Slow Shutter Speed:
Fast shutter speed:
Generally for video, you won’t be changing this much because you want that motion blur and will usually follow the 180-degree rule which is to have your shutter speed at double the frame rate you shoot at. There are some exceptions to this but I won’t cover that in this video.
Keep in mind though that for photos, the faster the shutter speed, the less light will be let into the camera. When the shutter opens and closes really fast, not a lot of light will be able to reach the sensor. So if you want to make sure your image is still well exposed, you will need to adjust the aperture to make sure you are still letting in enough light.
Well what happens if I want to keep my current shutter speed and I’m already at my lowest f-stop but the image is still too dark? Well, that leads me to my next point which is ISO.
ISO
ISO is artificial light that the camera adds to make the image brighter. If after you adjust the aperture and shutter speed and the image is still too dark, you can bump up the ISO to make the image brighter. This is similar to how the exposure slider works in Lightroom. However, you need to be careful, because the higher you go, the more noisy your image will be. Thus this is always the last resort if you can’t get your image bright enough. If you want an exact number, I wouldn’t go above 3200. But generally, keep this number as low as possible.
Low ISO vs High ISO:
Conclusion
Well, hopefully you learned something new on how to expose for your pictures and videos properly. If you use these 3 things correctly, you should get a well exposed image pretty much every time.