DSLR Camera Exposure: Making the Jump From Automatic to Manual

1. Course Intro: Hi guys, and welcome to this class on camera exposure, of course, where I'll be teaching you guys the fundamental skills to help you transition from automatic mode to manual mode. Lots of people think that automatic mode on a camera is okay. But if you want to get serious about your photography, the honest truth is it's not automatic mode lets the camera control a lot of the elements for you which limits your cameras creativity and ultimately your creativity. So having control of all these different elements puts you in the best position moving forward as a serious photographer. Now as a lecture, I've seen my students struggled to transition from automatic to manual mode. And I've been there myself as a student wants as well. So this is exactly why I've made this course. I've made this course to try and bridge that gap. And the aim is that by the end of this course, you'll be in a much stronger position as a photographer. Now, I won't actually be using any cameras hands-on in this course purely because of the fact that I've got certain types of cameras and you've probably got different cameras. So it would be silly for me to sit here and show you how to do it on a Canon 5D for example. So what I'm gonna be doing is I'm gonna be delivering the theory, explain the theory behind this, and set a new practical tasks which you can all do if you've got a DSLR camera at home. My name is Jonathan Parker. I'm a lecturer and landscape photographer and I can't wait to help you guys make the jump from automatic mode to manual mode. So let's get started. 2. What is Exposure?: So I think there's probably best before we start this course that we're on the same page about what exposure is. Now a lot of photographers and filmmakers will tell you that lighting is the most important. And whilst that can sometimes be true, also, so as exposure because if you can't understand how to translate the lighting from the real-world into an image on your camera. Or if you can understand how exactly that works and the processes that are behind it, then your footage or your photography still will be lacking. So in a sense, exposure is that light, the journey that that light takes down the barrel of your lens and hitting the sensor. 3. Aperture: So what is aperture? Well, before we look at a camera, we're going to actually look at the human eye. Because if we consider the pupil of a human, I do remember in school, you did that experiment where you'd be in pairs and one of you would cover your eyes so it's in darkness. And then as you reveal your eye to light in ten seconds time, you would see the iris starts off wide, but would actually end up constricting. Because in light, the pupil can let in less light so it can narrow. But in darkness, your pupils actually dilate and widened to try and let in more light. Well, it's the same with a camera. Inside a camera lens, you've got a barrel where, where the light will travel down. Now you can actually widen that aperture, which is that the aperture is the circular gate, which that light travels down. So you can actually widen the aperture to get more light into the camera. Or you can constrict that and close up the aperture, just like the hue, like the pupil in the human eye, to let in less light. So you can control how much light is traveling down the camera lens by altering the aperture, by having a wider aperture or more narrow aperture. Exactly the same principles as the human eye. Now, the actual diameter of the aperture is measured in something we call it an f-stop or F numbers, but generally we use the term f-stop. Now the lower the f number, and actually the wider the aperture is, and the higher the number, the smaller the diameter of the aperture. So an f-number of 2.8 would be a very wide aperture, letting down loads of light. An F22 would be really, really narrow, not letting down a lot of light. Now, there's also a secondary thing that happens when you have a wide aperture or a narrow aperture and depth of field. Now, think back to film or examples of photography. Maybe you'll see it more in film. Perhaps when you've got a figure, a person, an object in the foreground, but the background is way out of focus. That's depth of field. Depth of field is basically a principle which defines what is in focus or how much have we seen in that depth is actually in-focus. You'll see this in wedding photography when they're taking a photo of a wedding couple in a forest or for example, they all have the background, all our focus because it looks dreamlike and it puts the focus on them. Perhaps in landscape photography, you'd want all our landscape in focus. Okay, so that's depth of focus. It's controlling how much of that scene is in focus. And that's controlled by the aperture. Now a very wide aperture. Remember, that's a low f-number. So f2, 0.8 perhaps would give you a narrow depth of field. So the background would be way out of focus in the foreground, in-focus. And the more you constrict or the high F number, which will mean the tighter the diameter of that aperture, the more of that scene is in focus within depth. And again, think of the human eye. When you're trying to focus on something, you will squint because you're simulating the narrowness of your pupil to try and focus. Okay, So it's the same thing. So quickly recap. Aperture, it is how wide the hole in the lens is that the light can travel down a very wide aperture, lets in loads of life, but you have that narrow depth of field where only a narrow part of it is in focus. If you have a aperture of a high number F22, F 30, then that hole is a lot tighter. Lets less light in, so it's darker, but also more of the scene is in focus. And that focus, that depth of focus will be controlled with a focus on the camera. Aperture is probably the most difficult to understand out of the three. So if you've understood that kudos to you, well done, I will be going over that again in the end when we look at the exposure triangle. And it will probably start to make sense if it's not now, but by all means, give them video. Another watch. Remember, aperture is how wide that hole is that the light comes down. Wider hole, more light, more brighter image, more narrower hole. The less like this coming down and the darker the image, but also the wider it is, the more of a depth of field you have, the narrower it is, the kind of more of a picture that will be in focus. Okay, so a few principles to get your heads around. There'll be a challenge in the next, in the next lesson where I'm going to get you to challenge some of this yourself and practice some of these skills with your camera. So I look forward to seeing you in that next lesson. Let's jump on in. 4. Using Aperture (Class Project): Okay, so we've just learned about aperture. But before we go any further, I want you to try and put some of this to the test. With your camera. There's something called, or there's likely something called aperture priority mode. What aperture priority mode is, it'll often be represented by an AVI. What aperture priority mode is, is you control the aperture and the camera will sort out the other things to make sure it's exposed well enough. So what I like to do is it lets you experiment with depth of field. And that's sometimes the bit that people find harder to understand. So what I want you to do is I want you to take your camera. I want it to go into aperture priority mode, okay? And I want you to play around altering your aperture. Now that's sometimes done on the lens itself. It's sometimes done on little buttons on the camera. You're setups are gonna be, everyone's setup is going to be different. So you've got figured that out, right? But what I want you to do is I want you to practice altering the aperture on aperture priority mode. The exposure will be taken care of by the, by the camera, okay? It's just the aperture you're playing with. So a few things to consider. If I was doing this right here, right now, what I will be doing is I'll be getting, say perhaps this candle and I'll be taking a photograph. And I'd want first of all, to have this candle in focus and maybe the Canada Act of focus. Then I try and play around and I'd be like, Actually now I want to get the camera in focus, but this out-of-focus, I'm playing with depth of field. And then I do another image where I'd want everything in focus. Okay, so to do that very narrow aperture to get everything in focus, okay? So that's kinda what I want you to do. I want you to do three shots. I want you to find something, find a scene where there's depth, so things close to the camera, things far away. Want you to do a shot where whatever is closer to the camera, it's in-focus and then switch it around. So whatever is far away from the camera is in focus and closest is out of focus. But then shot where everything's in focus. So remember small apertures. But a small aperture is actually a high f-number, F22 at 2530. The likes. Another, another way you could purchase away. I like teaching this is God signed with the camera. Get a line of stones, put them in a line going away from the camera. And then you can do first one right at the beginning in-focus, then the last one in focus, then all of them. Because when you do that, you can actually see the stones incrementally get more and more out-of-focus or more and more into focus. And that's a really cool way of doing it. That's the challenge I want you to do. And I also want you all to post your photos in the class project so we could all see them because I'm really excited to see what you guys do with this. So that's it. I want you to do that class project. And then once you've done that, and only once you've done that, join into the next lesson, which is shutter speed, which will be a slightly easier one to get our heads around. So I'll see you guys there. 5. Shutter Speed: So I hope you find that project useful. I hope it helped you to understand actually a bit more. Now that we've done that, let's move on to the slightly easier one, shutter speed. So first of all, we've now understood how light actually traveled down the barrel of the camera lens. But first of all, before we look at shutter speed, less jumped back to old film cameras. Now the way old film cameras used to work is when you click the shutter, that iconic sound of the shutter. What that was is for a fraction of a second, a little door, a little sort of like a garage door really would open up and expose the film for a fraction of a second and I quickly closed. And that clicking, That's what the iconic sound was. So light to travel down the camera lens and expose and the piece of film for a fraction of a second didn't need long at all. So that's how shutter speed is measured in time. You can have a shutter speed of 1 second long. You can have a shutter speed of one-four thousandth of a shutter, obviously of a second long. And again, how long you expose that piece of film. Or in today's modern camera, It's a sensor. So how long you expose that sensor to the light? We'll determine the blindness. So you can imagine a longer shutter speed where it's OK, where that garage door is open for longer, will let loads more light in and make it brighter and brighter and brighter. But if you're only open it for one-four thousandth of a second, you can imagine it's not letting a lot of lighting, okay? So this is another thing that affects the exposure or the brightness of your image. Now, generally, when I'm doing landscape photography, I can't remember off the top of my head, but I'm not really needed on a sunny day, not really needing more than one 250th of a second normally, okay. But what shutter speed you need will be dictated by your environment and many, many things. But it's also important to remember that there's a secondary effect. Like with aperture, you have a secondary effect of depth of field. With shutter speed, you have a secondary effect. Think of a sports photographer filming really, really fast football or athletic runners. They gotta have a super, super fast shutter speed because they don't want any blurriness, they don't want any motion blur. That's what we call it motion blur. However, if you wanted to photograph car life to trails, you know those iconic photos of the light trails of cars. Well, you want the shutter open for the duration of that movement of that car. Imagine if you're trying to shoot a hummingbird and you're trying to freeze it in motion, you need a super, super fast shutter speed to capture that. But Daniela and in less light. So that's where this whole understanding of exposure fits in. A little bit of a quicker one this time, shutter speed, It's all about how long you're exposing the sensor on the camera to the light. The longer you expose that sensor to light, brighter the image is going to get naturally. But the more risk that your shot becomes blurry because it maybe camera shake fifth, 1 second photo and it's handheld. There's gonna be some camera shake. If you're trying to photograph a hummingbird and freeze it in motion, you've got to go superfast. But also if you want to get those car life to trails, or sometimes light painting photography if you've ever seen that. Or sometimes people will do with waterfalls where they'll do a really long exposure and elks or silky smooth. So you can use shutter speed creatively, but also you can use it for your exposure to let in or to, not to let in actually, but to record more and to expose sensitive more or less light to affect the brightness of that image. So that just about does it for shutter speed a little bit of a quicker and simpler what I think to understand an aperture perhaps. But in the next lesson, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to set you a little bit of a task, question based task to really test to see if you're picking up the things that I want you to pick up in relation to exposure. So when you're ready to jump into that next lesson, and let's see how we get on. 6. Shutter Speed Challenge: Okay. So shutter speed, you think he got it? Well, let's put it to the challenge. In the previous lesson, I mentioned that challenging scenario of photographing a hummingbird, trying to freeze those wings in motion, you need a super, super fast shutter speeds. So based, this is a question for you, based off what we've learned so far in this course. Knowing that you will need a really, really super-duper fast shutter speed That's going to not let a lot of light in at all. So thinking about the other things that we've learned in this course, how might you balance that out with something else that we've learned to ensure that that photograph is not too dark. Because again, if you're doing one ten thousandth of a shutter speed to capture that motion, to freeze that hummingbird emotion. You're not gonna get hardly any light recorded onto that center. So what else can you adjust or what else can you do to give yourself the best chance of exposing that correctly and brightly enough. Think back to some stuff maybe we talked about in the previous lesson. Once you've had to think, if you've got hummingbirds around, you go and take photo, that'll be super-duper cool. But maybe post your answers up in the class project or just have a think about it and let that muster over and really reflect upon it. Okay, so that's all I'm gonna do for this lesson. And in the next lesson we're going to look at the third and final element, which is ISO, which I think again will be slightly easier again to understand. So look, I'm looking forward to that. So let's jump on into the next lesson when you're ready. 7. ISO: Okay, so, so far we've looked at aperture and shutter speed. Now we're going to look at ISO, the third and final element of exposure, or the fundamentals of exposure. Iso is probably the easiest to understand, I think, but also the lesser known in my opinion. So in the previous lesson, when we looked at shutter speed, we talked about, we mentioned how we've moved from film cameras to sensors. And ISO is all about the sensor. But again, we're just going to look at the film contexts. Back when you could buy film. You could buy film of different sensitivities. So you could buy film that was more sensitive to light or less sensitive to light. So think about sports photographer, somebody who needs to expose the film only for fraction of a second, a more sensitive piece of film would be more advantageous to him. Okay. So also like lichen film cameras, you could have different sensitivities of film. The same is applicable in cameras. You can actually alter the sensitivity of your sensor in your DSLR to light. And that's measured in numbers, okay, so an ISO of a 100, the lowest ISO you get generally in most, in most sort of hobbyist and most cameras. And it goes up and it can go up all the way to like 25 thousand. So an ISO of 25 thousand is ultra, ultra sensitive to light, to a mass, it'll get massively bright images. Okay? So you have ISO and different cameras go up in different increments. It doesn't just go a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred different cameras will go up in different increments. So 100 hundred sixty two hundred fifty. Another camera, omega one hundred two hundred four hundred eight hundred, stuff like that. So that's how it's measured. An ISO is essentially how sensitive your camera sensor is. Now, like with shutter speed and aperture, there is a secondary effect of this. The higher your ISO, the more digital noise that you will get on your image. And to a degree with different cameras and different sensors, because each cameras have different centers of different sizes. Sometimes this will be noticeable on some cameras up to maybe 600 ISO, but maybe on some cameras it's noticeable at 400. Maybe on some cameras a deal better with low light and up bigger sensors. It's only node spell at 1600. But the fundamental thing to this is ISO is always the last one which you try and increase to improve the brightness of the image. Okay? I'll always look to shutter speed and aperture. And ISO was a last resort because you don't want to, you want to limit the amount of digital noise that you start introducing. Because like I said, as you increase ISO to get a brighter image, you also start introducing digital noise, which isn't good. But again, some of the better cameras would slightly bigger centers can deal with it better. I'll use a black magic camera, which is supposed to be quite good. And five D has a full-frame sensors and other cameras. I use that also quite good because of the size of the sensor. But different cameras are cheaper ranges may struggle a bit more. So remember, ISO is the sensitivity of that sensor, but it's the one you want to look to last. You want to try and solve that problem first with aperture and shutter speed. Iso, in a nutshell, the sensitivity of your sensor, you increase it for brighter images, but you also risk introducing digital noise. That's it. The last one that you want to look at in prioritize? So we're going to leave it there for, I assume. We're going to move into the next lesson now where we look at something called the exposure triangle, which basically ties these three things together. It ties together our understanding of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. And I'm also going to set you some additional tasks as well, some final projects, but we'll look at that in future lessons. Let's worry about that later. Let's jump into the next one where we'll summarize everything into the well-known exposure triangle. See you there. 8. The Exposure Triangle: So, so far we've learned about the three fundamental elements which affect exposure of an image, which is aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. Now, the image and illustration on screen at the moment, what that's gonna do is that's going to summarize the three of them together. And it'll show you how, what will happen with a lower versus higher ISO. So brighter images, but also degraded images with images with noise. And it'll show you a higher vs a faster versus a shorter shutter speed. So more, more brighter image with higher shutters, with slower shutter speeds, Sally, but also get more motion blur. And it will also highlight on the other side of the triangle a wider versus a narrower aperture, letting in more light, but also then you have the additional effect of depth of field. This exposure triangle will highlight all of these for you and it will be your job in the field to now use this exposure triangle to try and solve problems. So let's jump back to that problem of the hummingbird. As you'll see on that exposure triangle, you're going to need obviously because of the motion blur, you're going to need a super fast shutter speed, but then it's gonna be quite a dark image. So look at the two other elements that you've got left. You've got aperture and you've got ISO. Remember, ISO, you want to use as a last resort. So if we want to brighten the image, will need to look at an aperture which gives us more light and lets in more light. So that will also give us a narrow depth of field. So that's something we'll also have to balance and play with. And if you're still not getting a lot of light, then you'll have to go to the ISO and incrementally increase it. So that's what the exposure triangles for. You need to look at light, okay, if I want to, again, the hummingbird, I need, I've got to have, I want it to be in focus. I've got to have a fast shutter speed. Okay, That's a dark image. Let's look at the other relevance to see how we can introduce brightness. And again, with a wide aperture, you'll get that depth of field. If you really want, if you want to load the depth as well, well, you're going to have a narrow aperture. So you've created left, you're left with the ISO, and that's all. You're left with them. Okay? So using that exposure triangle, you can use that onset to figure out what you need to alter. Okay, I've got to have, I've gotta happen really, really wide aperture because I want the background out of focus and I want to narrow depth of fields to get there. Maybe the wedding couple in focus and the background all out of focus, but it's too bright, far too bright. So maybe, how do I introduce darkness will look at the other elements. I'm definitely a low ISO. Shutter speed needs to be quite rapid, quite quick to not record door expose that sensor for too long. So using this exposure triangle, if I were, you print one out or get an image on your phone. So when you're out in location, you can look at it for reference. So there we have it, folks, the exposure triangle, the thing we've been building up all our lesson so far, built up into this exposure triangle and we've got there, however, don't shoot off just yet. I've got two more lessons plus a bonus lesson at the end. So there's actually a lot more content to come. So stick around and I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Interactive Exposure Tool: Hi guys and welcome to this screen recorded lesson. Today we're on Exposure tool.com. And this is a really cool interactive tool where you've got shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, and you can alter them. So at the moment where on one, one-thousandths of a shutter speed. Okay, Now let's make that a longer shutter speed and you can see the effect, the motion effect it's having on that windmill. But as I bring it down, it's also getting very bright and our ISO is massively up. Okay, so we'll bring that down. And that's a nicer picture. The reason ISO is up is because let's put ISO down because we always want to start with it down. Well, to get split up being quite a dark scenario, I would have thought if I want my shutter speed to freeze that motion all the way up here at one, one-thousandth, what is black? And my aperture, or f 1.8. Remember the lower the number, the wider the aperture. So making that aperture narrower is going to let in even less light. So you're only left with ISO to alter. Okay? So we've got with our aperture wide open at 1.8, you've got the foreground in focus and the background. This is all I have to focus. So let's say we want to bring this into focus. Well, we need to make our aperture narrower as we learned in the Lessons area. So I'm going to increase that. And obviously we're letting less light in. So let's decrease the shutter speed to open it for longer. And you'll see now everything in the foreground is in focus. See there's actually a lens that I didn't realize. So you can have a play around and start to use this to learn how these affect the images. Because with loads of ISO, again, we're seeing how grainy that image is becoming. You've also got shutter speed priority. So if you click this, you alter that as you alter the shutter speed, ISO and aperture altar to properly expose a photo. And this is what shutter speed priority does on your camera. Shooting in shutter speed priority, it just kind of you-all to the shutter speed and the camera or Altis, everything else. Same with aperture. If you want to bring this back into focus, you just do aperture and the shutter speed and ISO altar for you. So that's that for that lesson, I do encourage you to go use Exposure tool.com is really, really helpful. But other than that, once you're done, move on to the next lesson. We're going to set you your final class project. I'll see you there. 10. Final Class Project: Guys, Well done. Give yourselves a clap. You've got this far. You've made it to the final class project. Now, what I'm going to require you from here is just for images and I think you've already practiced to them as well. Okay. So the first image I want, I want a snapshot of water. So that could be something like a new drop in a strawberry and some milk. Milk is not water. Drop strawberry or raspberry into water. But I want you to freeze-frame some water movement. That could be a lake, could be a river, could be anything. Second thing I want you to do is I want you to get some long exposure shots. And what I mean, but that maybe have a quick Google of long exposure shots because there's low the car trails and stuff like that. But you could also do it with water as well. Go to a stream, can get a long exposure shot of it to all look sort of IC. But then you've got to manage that exposure. You don't want it to be too bright. So you've gotta, you gotta think about that. So a short exposure shot of water, a long exposure shot if you're struggling to find a subject of water as well. And then I want you to do to depth of field shots. So something close to the camera in focus with the background out of focus. We did look at that one earlier. And then a scene or a landscape where you've got things in the foreground, but like maybe some, some bushes, but you've also got to stuff like skyline in the background as well. I want it all in focus. Okay, so what that's gonna do is it's gonna get you to play with exposure as a whole, especially the shutter speed one that'll be a step up from stuff we've done before. Especially if you're doing something like a liver, you've really got to expose it long to get it looking All silky smooth. You've really got to kind of manage that light to come in because you don't want it to be too bright and overexposed. So that's it. Those are your four images. Now, once you've done that, don't stop there. I want you to put them in the class project because I really want to see them and there'll be great if we can all share them together as well. Um, why not? Why not? When you upload the image, images, tell us what shutter speed it was, maybe one-four thousandth of a second or 1 second long with this aperture on this lens tell us information because that would be so cool to know and to learn. So again, thanks for joining guys. There's gonna be a bonus lesson at the end as well. But thank you for joining me in this course. I really hope you found that useful and I hope you learned some stuff. So cheers guys.