10 Ways That Understanding Your Camera Leads to Better Images

Perhaps you’ve heard this one before, or said even it yourself: I could take great pictures too, if I had your camera.

10 Ways That Understanding Your Camera Leads to Better Images

But saying pictures are great because of the camera is like saying Michael Jordan was great because of his shoes. Sure, the camera determines an image’s resolution, but give a $7,000 camera to a toddler and you’ll have a high resolution blur.

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The Big Three Basics

Recently we’ve explained some basic equipment terms so today I thought I’d continue with the beginner’s guides and introduce a few basic technical terms, starting with the Big Three:

Shutter Speed. Put in 4-year-old language this is the amount of time the shutter on your camera stays open. It is therefore the length of time the image sensor (in a digital camera) or film (in an old skool camera) is exposed to light.

Photographs are, generally, captured very quickly and so shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second. The larger the number underneath the 1 (the denominator) the faster the shutter speed.

Moving from one shutter speed to the next halves or doubles the amount of light getting in. Slow shutter speeds can be used to introduce some blurring into a photo (e.g. a blurred background) or used with a tripod to get good night time photos.

Aperture. Again, in 4-year-old language, this is the size of the opening in the lens when you take a photograph. The larger the opening the more light that gets through the lens and “hits”

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Understanding exposure: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO

When your camera is set on automatic, making a photograph is as simple as pressing the shutter release button. Somehow, the camera magically records just the right amount of light to render an image of the scene before it. But what is really going on? How does the camera know how to do that?

Read on to find out how a little knowledge about what goes into making an exposure can open up new worlds of creative possibilities.

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