Exposure Fundamentals Masterclass for Landscape Photographers

1. Welcome!: Hello, and welcome to this course on the fundamentals of exposure for landscape photographers. My name is Meredith Fontana, and I am a full time landscape photographer in Denver, Colorado. And I have helped thousands of students improve their landscape photography and feel confident with their camera settings and their post processing skills. Do you want to get off auto mode and learn how to take control of your camera setting so that you can finally master your camera and take better photographs? If you are just getting into photography or our more experienced photographer who wants to dive deeper and master the fundamentals than this course is for you. This course, you will learn how to take control of your aperture, shutter, and ISO, so that you can start creating images that reflect your creative vision. Course is unique because it is specifically tailored to address the exposure challenges and nuances of landscape photography, which are different than those of other genres of photography. Exposure is the foundation of every great photograph. And mastering it is essential for any landscape photographer who wants to take beautiful images of the natural world. Imagine being able to get perfect exposure in every photo that you create because you know the exact settings to choose in any lighting situation. After completing this course, you will feel confident using manual mode on your camera. And you will never feel confused about which exposure settings to choose ever again. So if you are ready to join me in learning how to get off auto mode and take control of your camera, then I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson. 2. Camera Basics - How Images Are Made: Hey, there y'all, and welcome to this course on the fundamentals of landscape photography. I am so excited that you're here because whether you are a brand new photographer who just bought your first camera and are starting to take your first landscape images, or if you've been shooting for a while and are looking to double down on the fundamentals, so you can become a better photographer, then you are in the right place. In this first lesson, you're going to learn the fundamentals of how your camera works. And this is really important to understand because it's going to lay the foundation of what we'll learn about later in this course on exposure and camera technique and specific settings that you're going to want to use for the best possible landscape photographs. Let's first take a look at what you're going to learn in this lesson. And first, we're going to go over how a DSLR and a mirrorless camera work, because you likely have one or the other of these types of cameras. And if you don't, that's okay. It's important to learn these things because you'll likely want to invest in one of these types of cameras if you want to get more into landscape photography. We're also going to cover a special feature that most of DSLR and mirrorless cameras have, which is called live view. And this is going to come really in handy when you start to preview your exposures in the field. And we're also going to cover how to review your images in the field. So we're going to talk about previewing exposure and reviewing your exposure. And this is, again, going to lay the foundation for what we learn about in the following lessons when we start to dive into camera exposure and camera settings and things like that. All right, so let's review the different options you have in terms of the best camera choices for landscape photography. And this is a bit of a review if you haven't seen my course on how to choose the best gear for landscape photography. Definitely go back, watch that course because that will teach you a lot of what you need to know in terms of how cameras work, how to choose the best features of a camera for landscape photography. But as a quick review, The best options, if you want to get into landscape photography is to choose either a DSLR or a mirror list camera. And I talk about the differences between these two types of cameras in that course on choosing the best gear for landscape photography. Really, when it comes down to whether or not you choose a DSLR or a mirror list, I would definitely recommend you go for the mirror list if you're looking to invest in your first camera because that's where all the camera manufacturers. This is a newer technology. And this is where all of the the money that camera manufacturers are starting to throw into research and development. So DSLRs are an older technology, been around for several decades now. There's nothing wrong with them. They still take top notch photographs. Really, Morals have started to catch up in the last few years. So it really comes down to how much you want to spend and how much weight you want to carry. Mireless cameras tend to be a little bit more expensive than DSLRs, but they're also a little bit lighter. So if you do a lot of hiking, especially long hiking, long hikes like into the back country, things like that, mirrorless cameras are going to likely be a better option for you. I recently just switched from a DSLR to a mirrorless camera, and the weight savings are pretty significant. So if you are on the market for a new camera, I highly consider you going for the mirrorless at this point. So these cameras we have here on the left, these are not the most ideal for landscape photography. And particularly, these compact cameras are not great because you can't change the lenses. Unlike the DSLRs and mils, where they have interchangeable lenses, where you can change a wide angle lens or To a telephoto lens. You can't do that with a compact camera. What you buy is what you get really forever. There also aren't a lot of dials and buttons around to make it easy to change your exposure settings or your camera settings. It's a lot more intuitive, in my opinion, and easier on a DSLR or a mirror list than it is on a compact. There's also going to be some other limitations there as well that I get more into in the gear course. Now, these days, your cell phone can take incredible photos, and there's nothing wrong with using your cell phone for landscape photography. In fact, I use my cell phone a lot when I'm doing landscape photography, especially when I'm trying to get ideas for composition and stuff like that. But there are going to be a lot of limitations with your iPhone as well. Again, I discussed these more in depth in the gear course, but just to briefly summarize, again, you don't have interchangeable lenses. You just have the lens that you're given permanently on the camera, so you can't change the focal length. Although a lot of cameras these days are starting to have lenses with different focal lengths that you can switch between, which is nice, if you want to take wide angle or telephoto photos, Another problem with phone cameras is that the sensors are really small. And as the sensor size gets smaller, the image quality is not going to be as good as if you use say, a full frame or a crop sensor in a mirrorless or a DSLR camera. There's also problems with your camera your phone not being weather sealed. It can get damaged. All kinds of problems can come up when you use your cell phone for landscape photography. So that leaves us with a medium format camera over here. And these are also definitely worth exploring. I would say more so when you get more advanced into landscape photography. The reason that these aren't going to be included in this particular course is because for most people, what these cameras cost is going to be out of range for the average photographer, these can cost upwards of 50 $8,000 or more upwards of $15,000. So for most people, those aren't going to be the best cameras, especially when you're starting out. So in this course, we are going to focus on how DSLR and mirrorless cameras work. And as we work through how exposure works and exposure settings, I'm going to be teaching you this from the eyes of someone who's using a DSLR or a mirrorless camera. They work in similar ways. So if you understand one, the other will be very easy for you to understand as well. All right. So let's first take a look at how a DSLR camera works. And again, this is an older technology. And once you understand how a DSL power works, it's going to make it much more easy to understand how a mirrorless camera works. And I know there's a lot of labels and colors and symbols going on here, but we're going to break all of this down, and you don't have to necessarily understand all of this in order to take amazing photos, but it's actually quite simple. So what I have here in this diagram is simply a cross section of a camera. So if we took a camera with a lens on it and cut it in half, what you would see are all of these components inside of a DSLR camera. So starting with the front of the lens, this is the lens, and this is attached to the camera body. Again, we're just looking at it from the side. And in the lens, you have what these symbols are in green are called lens elements. And these are just pieces of glass that bend light as it comes in through the front of the lens, it bends light, and then focuses it so that when it reaches the inside of your camera, you can capture an image from this focus focus. The other thing to note that's really important inside of a lens is something called an aperture. And we're going to do a real deep dive into what aperture is. If this is a new term to you, don't worry about it. We'll go cover aperture extensively. It's a really important part of photography, but it's essentially just a hole in the lens that light passes through, and you can adjust the size of this hole in the lens by changing your aperture settings on your camera. So light passes through the lens elements and the aperture, and it reaches something called a reflex mirror. And this is just a mirror that directs light. It directs it into a different direction inside of your camera. This will make more sense in just a moment. But just know for now, the reflex mirror is just positioned at a 45 degree angle so that it can direct light upward. We have here, we'll start with the sensor here. So again, in the gear course, I cover what image sensors are, and we do a deep dive of how image sensors work and how they're different in different cameras. But essentially, as a review, an image sensor is just a photosensitive piece of hardware in your camera. It's at the back of the camera here, and it contains millions of photosensitive diodes, which are also called pixels. So these pixels, they collect light information, and they convert it into a digital signal. And once it collects the light and converts the light into a digital signal. The camera processes this into an image. So it convert this physical light beam coming in. And the way to think about an image sensor is the way you think about film in an old analog camera. So film collected the light on a photosensitive piece of film, and the sensor essentially acts as the same thing as film used to. It just does so in a digital way. It turns light into digital information. And then we have the shutter right here. This is essentially just a curtain that blocks the image sensor from receiving light. The shutter will open, and that will allow light to hit the digital image sensor. Now, up here at the top of the camera, we have something called a pentaprism. And don't worry too much about the pentaprism. Just know that it directs light around through the top of the camera and out through the view finder. This, again, this will make a little bit more sense in just a moment. And here at the top, we have the shutter button, which you are likely already familiar with. Even cell phones have a shutter button. It's just the button you press that tells the camera that you want it to take the image or the exposure. And right up here, we have the optical viewfinder. And this is where you look into the camera and see what's going on through the front of the lens. Now, one thing I want to note right here is this viewfinder right here, it's called an optical viewfinder. There's optical viewfinders, and there's also electronic viewfinders, which we'll learn about here in just a moment when we get into mirrorless cameras, and essentially what an optical viewfinder does. And what makes a DSLR a DSLR is that when you look through the optical viewfinder, what you're seeing is what's coming through the front of the lens. There's no electronics involved in converting the path of light into what you're seeing through your eye. So the light comes in, it's reflected up, and then you see what's going on through the front of the lens because the mirror and the pentaprism is redirecting the light through the camera. All right. So let's remove some of these labels. And what's going on here? This is essentially what we're looking at in the last slide, just removing all these arrows and labels to make it more simple. What's going on is that the light in the DSLR, it comes through the front of the lens. It's reflected vertically from the reflex mirror right here just reflects the light, so it bounces up vertically. The light is directed around the pentaprism, and then out through the optical view finder. And this is what's going on when the mirror is considered down. So we say mirror down when you are looking through the view finder and and the image is not being taken. So this is before you press the shutter button. Now, what happens when you press the shutter button, and this is how the image is created, is that the mirror, right here, it flips up what happens when the mirror flips up is that the light is no longer reflecting off the mirror and up into the pentaprism. The light goes directly to the image sensor where the information from the light is being collected by the image sensor. So this image sensor is collecting everything that's coming in through the scene and it's creating the image. Now, the other thing that's going on here is that the shutter or this curtain right here just lifts up. So when the shutter opens up, it allows the light to hit the sensor. It essentially removes the barricade, protecting the image sensor from light. And once the exposure is complete, the shutter will close back down and will go back to mirror down. The light will continue to be blocked, and the shutter will come down, the curtain will come down, and the image sensor will not be exposed to light. Now, if you have a DSLR, and you might have noticed that when you press the shutter button and this whole series of events occurs when the mirror lifts up and the shutter opens up, that you don't see anything through the optical viewfinder. And the reason for that is because the light isn't being directed up into the pentaprism, and then through the optical viewfinder. And so what you see through here is completely black until the mirror goes down and the light is redirected back through the optical view finder. All right, so that is how a DSLR works. Let's talk about how more modern mirrorless cameras work. It's very similar, and as the name suggests, there are no mirrors in a mirrorless camera. That's why obviously, they call them a mirrorless camera. Because there are so many components of the DSLR that can be removed due to the lack of a mirror. This is why these cameras can be a lot more compact and a lot smaller and way less. So what's going on here is, like I said, very similar. Lights coming through the lens elements through the aperture ns, and it directly hits the image sensor. So this is before you press the shutter button when you are not taking an exposure. So you'll notice that the shutter is down when you are not taking the image. This is a fundamental difference between DSLR and mirrorless cameras is that the shutter is up. Go back a little bit when you are not taking a photograph. Yeah. And with a mirrorless camera, the shutter is open before you take the photograph. So when you are framing your image, before you press the shutter button, and you're creating your composition, and you are looking through your view finder, what you are seeing is the image that the image sensor is creating by the collection of light, and then the conversion of that light into an electronic signal. So the sensor is essentially creating this digital image, and this digital image is projected into the viewfinder. So instead of seeing exactly what is in front of the lens, you are seeing a conversion of that light into a digital image, and then that digital image is what you see through the viewfinder. And that's why they call this an electronic viewfinder because you're not seeing the light as it's reflected directly into the optical viewfinder, as we saw before. So the electronic viewfinder is a technology that some photographers may not prefer over an optical viewfinder. And if you don't like that the image is converted into a digital image before you take the photograph, then maybe a mirrorless camera isn't for you. And we'll get into some of the pros and cons of using an electronic viewfinder, especially when it comes to previewing your images before you take the photograph. All right, so let's say you press the shutter button. What happens when you take the exposure, the shutter will close. I'll come up from the bottom, and it will close. And what's going on here, when the exposure is being taken, and the image is being captured, the image sensor starts to process the light data into an image, and it needs the shutter to be closed, it needs to stop taking in light information while it's processing the exposure to create the image. So what happens here is you're not going to see anything coming through the electronic viewfinder while the exposure is being taken. All right. So we covered how DSLR cameras work and how mirrorless cameras work. Both of these types of cameras, especially modern versions of DSLRs and Morless cameras, they all have something called an LCD screen. And this is just a screen on the back of the camera that allows you to perform many different functions, a few of which we're going to talk about here in just a moment. So the first really important thing about your LCD screen on the back of your camera is that you can use a feature called live view. And this is pretty much on all cameras that have an LCD screen. Even your cell phone has essentially the equivalent of what live view is on a mirrorless or a DSLR camera. What it does is it's a screen that allows you to preview the image that you're about to take in real time. It's like using your camera as LCD screen as a viewfinder. Instead of using the viewfinder looking through it with your eye, you can just use the LCD screen on the back of your camera to frame the image to set up your composition. And the other great thing about this is that you can see all of the camera settings on the LCD screen when you're using live view. You can also see them when you're using an electronic viewfinder in a lot of cameras, but it just it's much easier to use live view to view all of your settings. And a lot of these settings we're going to cover later in this course. Like I shutter speed, aperture. Also, it allows you to view your histogram. Again, we're going to cover histogram later in this course. This is a really, really helpful tool that's going to allow you to get perfect exposure in every photograph that you take. I'm going to teach you how to use the histogram when you're shooting in the field. And like I said, previously, it gives you a really accurate view of the final image. So when you see the image on live view, it's going to be exactly like that when you press the shutter button. And the other really great thing about live view is that you can zoom in to 100% and focused in at 100%, so you can really dial in your focus better than you could than if you were using the view finder, electronic or optical viewfinder. Yeah, I'm going to teach you how to do that in the focusing part of this course, how to use your live view to zoom in and get the most sharp focus you could ever imagine. And finally, just to add in here, another great part of live view is that it allows you to level your camera. A common mistake that landscape photographers make is they don't quite level the camera before they take the image, so the horizon will be kind of off. It might be tilted to one side or the other at an angle, and you can pull up this leveling tool. A lot of cameras have it, and will allow you to level your camera perfectly with the horizon. These are all really really essential tools when you are taking landscape photographs. So Live view is really going to be your best friend when you are previewing your exposures or your images before you take your photograph. How do you actually get to live view? Well, here are just examples from two major camera manufacturers. So typically on a Nikon, you will see a LV symbol. And on a canon, you'll see this little camera button. If you don't have a cannon or a nicon, definitely go look up on your camera manual or Google. How do I pull up wide view on, say a Fuji or a Sony? This will be different for different cameras, and it'll also be different typically if you have a mirror list or a DSLR camera. So I don't want to tell you exactly how this is done because I don't know exactly what type of camera you have. Use a Nikon, so you press this LV button and it will turn live view on and off, and some do it automatically. So when you put your eye up to the electronic viewfinder, if you're using a mirrorless camera, it'll automatically switch to the viewfinder. And when you take your eye away from the viewfinder, the live view will automatically turn on. Again, refer to your camera manual or Google your specific camera make and model to figure out how to use your live view, but I definitely recommend as an assignment for this lesson, go figure out how to turn live view on on your camera, your specific camera. Because this tool is still important, we're going to keep coming back to this particular camera feature. All right. So the other amazing thing about your LCD screen is that it allows you to review your exposure. So after you take your images, You can use a feature called image playback. And this allows you to check whether or not you got the exposure the way you wanted to. And that's by reviewing the histogram. When you pull up your image on image playback, you can look at these histograms here and make sure that your exposure was taken properly. It also allows you to check other settings to ensure that the image came out exactly like you wanted it. For example, check your composition and your focus and things like that. Really, really important feature. And again, we're going to come back to how to use a histogram, how to check your focus in image playback. We'll use these tools later in the course. I just want you to know that these things exist and how to access them. So in order to get to your image play back, pretty much for all cameras, it's this little play button right here. As far as I know, all the major manufacturers and different types of cameras use this same play button in order to access the setting. So in order to access these types of settings like your histogram, you might need to check your manual. Oftentimes, if you use the toggle, the back of your camera, Using the up or down arrow, you can go through the different settings that were captured with that particular image when you're in image playback. Again, don't worry about this too much right now. Just know how to get back and review your image using image playback. So again, another little assignment for this lesson. Figure out how to play back an image after you take an exposure. Just take a simple exposure, press the shutter button and try to review that image using image play back. Now, image playback is like I was just saying. It's great for checking your exposure, checking your composition, making sure that your image wasn't focused. And if you review your image and you find that the settings were just not what you wanted. If you kind of screwed up the exposure, want to change something, it gives you the opportunity to make those adjustments in the field before you get home and realize, Oh, my gosh, I I got this amazing photograph, but this part of it is out of focus. I wish I had used image playback and reviewed my image by zooming in and checking all the corners, all the details of my image. So anyway, this is, like I said, going to be your best friend when you're taking photos in the field, and you're in situations where you don't have a chance to really go back and take these images again, say if you're on a trip, vacation, you want to review your images in the field before you realize it's too late when you get home. The other thing here is once you take your images, and you have images that say are out of focus or over exposed, underexposed. You can delete them right in this playback. So usually there's a button on the back of your camera or in the settings like on my camera, right here, this is my old camera. There's a little trash can. This will allow you. I could press that and just delete this exposure if I didn't like that. So it's nice to kind of get rid of images in the field, so you're not really filling up your memory card. That about wraps it up for this lesson. That is the very, very basics of how your camera works, as well as some of the most important features of your camera, like live view and image playback on the LCD screen, that's going to be really important to understand moving forward throughout the rest of this course. So we're just laying the foundation foundation. There's a lot more complexity to how these things work. But if you get a grasp on how the basics work at this point, it's really going to give you a better understanding of the fundamentals of exposure as we move forward and into the next few lessons. Thanks again for being here. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 3. What is Exposure in Photography?: Welcome back to the class ill. In this video, you're going to learn all about what the term exposure means. And as you might already know, exposure is one of the most important topics in photography. So it's really important that you have a solid understanding of what this term means when other photographers are referring to exposure and how I'll be using the term exposure as we move throughout this course. So let's take a look at what we're going to learn in this lesson. Just a brief overview. We will talk about the technical definition and the common definitions of how most photographers refer to exposure. We also cover what overexposure and underexposure means. And what correct, I put that in parentheses for a reason. We'll talk about what correct exposure means as well, and why I use parentheses whenever I'm referring to correct exposure. You'll also learn the number one exposure mistake that Landscape photographers make. You're really going to want to stay and understand what this mistake is so you can avoid making it in your photography. Finally, we'll cover a few creative exposure techniques. If you want to use more artistic expression in your photography, we'll briefly go over what that might look like in terms of exposure. All right. Let's talk about what it means to create an exposure because oftentimes you'll hear photographers use the term exposure interchangeably with the terms image or photograph. When you hear a photographer say that they are making or creating an exposure, what they really mean is that they are taking a photo, that they're making an image. What you see here is just the same diagram that you saw in the previous lesson. This is just a cross section of a DSLR camera, very simplified diagram of a DSLR camera. So when you create an exposure, essentially what you're doing is you are exposing the image sensor to light. If you remember from the previous lesson, when you press the shutter button, this reflex mirror, if you have a DSLR camera, this reflex mirror flips up, the shutter opens up, and the path of light is allowed to reach the image sensor. Once the sensor is exposed, that's where we get the term exposure. The image can be created. The camera will process the digital information and save the image onto your camera's memory card. But what does the term exposure really mean? You'll hear the term exposure used over and over and over again in photography. So it's important to have an understanding of what the technical definition is that we can all agree upon when we're referring to the term exposure. And what that technical definition is is it's the amount of light that reaches the camera's image sensor. Or film. So if you're using a camera with film, exposure refers to the amount of light that reaches the film. But most people these days are using digital cameras. Exposure typically refers to the quantity or the amount of light that hits the image sensor. Exposure is so fundamental. It's so key in photography because it determines how bright or how dark your image is going to be. This is why you need to have such a strong understanding of how your exposure settings work on your camera, which we'll get to later in this course. What happens when you let too much light into your camera? To much light hits the image sensor? Well, when too much light gets to your image sensor, then the image is going to be over exposed. That really just means that the image is going to be too bright. When the image is too bright, you'll lose a lot of detail in the brightest parts of the image. This is what we call the highlights. This particular image that we're looking at here, this is just a photograph of delicate arch in Arches National Park in Utah. Just by looking at this image, you can tell that it doesn't look natural to the eye. This is not what this scene looked like when the photographer was out shooting this scene. If you don't let enough light hit the image sensor, then the image is going to be under exposed. The image is going to be too dark. This is the exact same photograph, but you can see here that it looks way too dark. It looks much darker than when the photographer was out shooting the scene. It doesn't look natural. You can see certain areas in the darkest parts of the image. We call these the shadow tones. Are completely black. We don't see any detail. We've lost color. It's not an ideal situation to have an underexposed photograph, particularly in this circumstance. However, we get correct exposure when the photograph looks natural to the eye. When you're out shooting, often in Landscape photography, the goal is to get an exposure that's not too bright, it's not too dark, and it captures all of the details and colors that you saw with your eyes when you were out shooting. This is what you would typically consider to be a correct exposure. I put correct in quotation marks because, as you'll learn here in just a moment, there's really no such thing as correct exposure. It's actually more of a subjective term which can make the definition of exposure or what is correct exposure slightly complicated. But just stick with me here. So, let's first, before we talk about more about what correct exposure is. Let's talk about something called clipping. And flipping is what I would consider the number one mistake you can make when you are choosing your exposure settings on your camera. Again, you'll learn all about how to control exposure, how to set your cameras exposure settings in the next lesson in the following lessons throughout this course. But it's really important for you to understand what flipping is. And what flipping is, just move this bubble right up here. It's essentially when you have either pure black, due to under exposure or pure white in a photo due to over exposure. And what happens when you clip an image is you lose detail. This is just something really important to keep in mind when you are taking your images, when you're creating your exposures is you really want to avoid clipping. And this is where using your histogram is going to come in. We'll learn all about what the histogram is. But just so you know for now, the histogram is going to show you whether your image is too bright and you're losing detail and your clipping. Or if your image is too dark and you have pure black tones, and you're clipping the shadows. So when we have they properly exposed or a correctly exposed image, we don't have any clipping. We've retained detail in the highlights, and we've retained details in the shadows. So let's talk about the caveat to what correct exposure really means. Like I mentioned, correct exposure is a subjective curve, because for most photographers, Correct exposure means that there's no clipping in the image and that the image looks natural to your eyes. It looks like what you saw when you were out in the scene. It's a really great goal to have when you're out in the field shooting. Especially when you're a beginner, I definitely recommend that you start out trying to create images where the image isn't too bright, over exposed, or under exposed. However, you will eventually want to explore something called creative exposure. And this is when you intentionally over expose or under expose an image to have some type of artistic effect, some type of artistic expression, where you can express a mood or a feeling, an idea, an emotion. And this is why correct exposure can be different for different images or for different photographers. So for example, just to make this a little bit more clear to help you make sense of this. Here are two photographs that I shot, and one technique that I love to do is intentionally under expose an image. What that means is I reduce the exposure so much, or I reduce the amount of light reaching my image sensor so much that I lose all of the detail in the shadows. And what this does is it creates this silhouette effect. And this can have a greater impact in your image because by losing the details in the shadows, you're emphasizing other aspects of the photograph. So right here on the left, this is just a ridge line of mountains. This is occurring at sunset and I used a long exposure to allow the clouds to really blur as they move across the sky. But the intention here was to highlight really the outline of the mountain ridge, this ridge line here, because it was so dramatic, and it was so interesting to me that I didn't want any of the tones in the mountain to distract or any of the details here to distract from what I wanted to emphasize in this photo. So this is an example of using exposure in a way that allowed me to express my creative intention. The same thing here. I wanted to emphasize what was going on at Twilight. And I wanted to simplify the scene because that's what I was feeling in this moment. It was a very kind of quiet, simple moment that I wanted to express by reducing the details in the shadows, but also emphasize the silhouette of the trees. So you're just focusing on the trees and the moon and the sky. So again, creative exposure is a topic that we will go into extensively in another course, but it's just something to keep in mind that you can deliberately change the exposure settings to make your photo too bright or too dark on purpose. And again, this is up to you as the artist who wants to express themselves creatively. And here is another example. This is a scene of a forest in a blizzard, and I intentionally overexpose this image just a little bit, not dramatically here, but I wanted to emphasize how intense this blizzard was. And I wanted to reduce some of the details. So you almost feel like you're getting lost in the blizzard that's occurring here in the forest. So we do lose a lot of detail up in here where some of these tones are becoming pure white and getting washed out, but I really like that effect. It gives it more of a snow globe, cold, dramatic effect here. The other thing I wanted to point out in terms of getting correct exposure. And this is something that will happen often in landscape photography is when you are shooting a scene directly into the sun, you're not typically going to be able to avoid flipping the highlights. So for example, in this scene here, this is the top of a mountain at Sunrise that I hike to. At two in the morning. It was pretty difficult, but I made it for sunrise, and I shot directly towards the sun because I wanted to create the story of what was occurring over the mountain range, the sun rising over this unbelievably beautiful mountain range. But right here you can see that a lot of the tones are completely white or almost completely white. There's no detail. And this is really common when you're shooting into the sun. We'll cover more techniques for dealing with situations where you have really high contrast scenes. In other words, scenes where part of the scene is really bright or really dark. There's a big difference between the brightest and the darkest parts of your scene. It's usually at sunrise and sunset that occurs. Here's another example shooting directly into the sun. I've clipped the highlights here. And another term you'll often hear particularly with highlights is they're blown out, which means that you've lost detail. You've clipped those tones in the brightest parts of your image. All right. So let's briefly cover what you've learned in this lesson so far. So you've learned that exposure is the amount of light that reaches your camera's image sensor. You also learned that exposure determines how bright or how dark an image will be. And that's why it's one of the most important concepts in photography. Over exposure is when an image is too bright. Under exposure is when an image is too dark. And clipping is when you lose detail or light information due to overeposing or under exposing an image. And this is not necessarily a bad thing, like we just saw when you're shooting into the sun, clipping is not the end of the world. And you also learned that correct exposure is a subjective term. It's really up to you as the photographer as the artist to decide what exposure is best for a given image. Every image and every scenario is going to be different. So you have to judge what you want to create through your own vision. You can either create images that are realistic or true to life, so you can create exposures that try to match exactly what you saw with your eyes. And you can also create exposure, a correct exposure that aligns with your vision as an artist, that might mean making a silhouette or an intentional over exposure. This all can be considered a correct exposure. Just something to keep in mind as we move throughout this course, In the following lessons, we're going to start learning about how you control exposure with your camera using specific camera settings. I look forward to seeing you soon in the next lesson. 4. Elements of Exposure: F-stop: In this lesson, you are going to learn about one of the three most important camera settings that you must understand in order to have complete control over exposure in your images. So let's take a look at what you are going to learn in this lesson on F stop. We are going to cover the four elements of exposure. Within those four elements, we're going to talk about the three settings that control exposure. Spoiler alert, one of those settings is going to be F stop since the focus of this lesson is F stop. We'll talk about why FSTop and aperture are not the same thing. Oftentimes these two terms are used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing, and we'll talk about why that is. We'll also talk about how FSOp affects exposure. And this is really the core concept in this lesson. We'll talk about a really important concept called the FSOp scale. This is something you're going to want to memorize, and I will show you a trick how to memorize the FSTop scale. We will cover what a stop of light is. This is also a fundamental concept that we will be discussing more throughout the rest of this course, but we'll lay the groundwork here in this lesson. So you know what that means moving forward. We'll also discuss how to control F stop on your camera. How to control this setting on your particular camera, no matter what make and model your exact camera is. Let's dive into what the four elements of exposure are. Now, what we're looking at here is a diagram that should be pretty familiar to you at this point. This is just the cross section of a DSLR camera, and I've been looking at this camera for the past few lessons. You should have an understanding of what the di symbols inside this camera are, what the different elements are. But what we've added to this diagram here is a sun. What's going on here is the sun is liminting this tree, and I'll move this little bubble up a little bit. The sun is illuminating the tree, the light is coming through the sun. From the sun, it's reflecting off of the tree. Now, when it reflects off of this tree, this is just the scene that we're shooting a simplified scene. The reflected light is going to go in all different directions. I haven't put the arrows in all different directions because we're primarily focused on the reflected light that is reflected directly towards the camera. This is the light that's going to be collected into the camera lens, move through the lens, and then expose the image via the image sensor. This reflected light is called the scene luminant. This is the first element of exposure. And the way to think about luminance is really how bright or dark the scene is. On a really bright, sunny day, so you're shooting this tree and the sun, it's the middle of the day. There's no clouds in the sky. It's really bright. There's going to be very high scene luminates. And if you're shooting at Twight, Sunset, maybe even at night, maybe some aster photography. The scene luminant is going to be very low. The amount of incoming light that's reflected from the scene is the scene luminans. We can actually measure this. We can quantify the actual amount of light coming from the scene. We do that in units of ands per meter squared. That's what these units are right here. You don't have to understand that if you are unfamiliar with SI units. Just think of scene luminans as the amount of reflected light. Brighter light, higher scene luminans, lower light, lower scene luminant. Now, the second element of exposure is F stop. We've talked a little bit about aperture, and aperture and F Stop are related. We'll discuss in just a moment how they are related. But just for now understand that the four elements of exposure, the second one is F stop. And FSTop, again, is just one of the ways that we control exposure in our images. The third element is shutter speed. The shutter speed is the amount of time that the image sensor is exposed to light, we'll be covering shutter speed in a feature lesson. And then you have ISO, the fourth element of exposure. And that is just the amplification of the light that reaches the image sensor. We'll also discuss this in a future lesson of this course as well. Of the four elements of exposure, only three you can control. So you cannot control the scene luminans. The amount of light reflected from the scene is the amount of light reflected from the scene. We don't have control over what the amount of light is that enters the camera lens. We don't have control over how bright the sun is or how many clouds are in the sky. But we do have control over these three camera settings. Let's first talk about before we dive into the specifics of F stop and how it works. Let's talk a little bit more about aperture. We've mentioned it before. Again, aperture is just the element right here inside the lens. Aperture is just the opening in the lens through which light passes. So this is the aperture right here. If you were to look through the front of your lens, you would see something that looks like this. And in addition to this aperture right here, you will see these flat pieces of metal. Called aperture blades. And aperture blades allow you or allow the aperture to open and close so you can adjust the stylee of the aperture. This is essential in photography, the ability to open and close the aperture to regulate how much light enters the camera lens. You can see here in this short video, what it looks like when the aperture blades widen and close the aperture. Usually there's somewhere around five to nine aperture blades that create the aperture in the lens. Let's talk about the most important concept that you need to understand when it comes to aperture. It's going to guide us into how F stop works. Here we have a series of apertures from really wide to really narrow. The important concept you need to understand is that a larger or wider aperture, as you see here, is going to allow more light to enter the lens, and the more light that enters the lens, means more light will reach the image sensor. H. So more light that reaches the image sensor means more exposure, which in turn means the image will be brighter. If you let more light hit the image sensor, that image is going to be much brighter. On the flip side, when you close the aperture, when the aperture is narrow, less light will be able to come through the lens, and less light will reach the image sensor, there will be a decrease in exposure. The wider the aperture is, the more light enters through the lens, and the smaller the aperture, the less light is able to pass through the lens. Where does FS Stop come in? What is F stop? Well, we talked a little bit about F stop here, that it relates to aperture, but they are not the same thing. Now, the F stop is the number that's used to represent the size of the aperture. It's not the aperture itself, it's the number that represents how wide or how narrow the aperture is. Thanks of this little bubble down here. So if we look again at this scale of apertures from widest to narrow. These aren't drawn to scale, but it's just a simple representation of what an aperture looks like wide open and then closed up. So FSTop will tell us if the aperture is really wide, or it will tell us the number will tell us if it's really narrow. In turn, it logically follows that the FSTop will tell us how much light is entering the lens to expose the image. So an F stop at this end of the scale is going to let in a lot of light. So F 1.4 is going to let in a lot of light through the lens, and an F stop of 32 is going to let in a very small amount of light. So exposure is going to be much lower. The F stop scale, we just looked previously at this scale of F stops. This scale is a series of fixed F stops. And this series of numbers is used to represent the aperture settings on pretty much every camera lens. And the reason for this is so that every camera lens has a consistent or standardized set of F stop. So if you have a wide angle lens or a telephoto lens, they're all going to have these exact same F stops as settings on your camera. We'll talk about why the numbers seem random, but we'll talk about why these numbers are, what they are. Now, it's really important that you memorize this F stop scale. Because you're going to be using it so much and because you need to understand what happens when you go to say, for example, F 5.6 to F eight, what is occurring in the exposure of your image. We'll get to that a little bit later in this lesson. But for now, just know that you're going to want to memorize this. If you really want to master your camera and master photography in general. I'll show you a trick of how to memorize this. It goes from being a bunch of random numbers. To a more logical sequence of numbers that's easier to remember. If you take a look at this first F stop here, and something I should also mention. I mentioned that all lenses have the same sequence of F stops, but there is differences between the maximum or widest aperture. On some lenses and the smallest aperture on some lenses. So lenses might go to F 1.2 or F one, and some lenses might go even smaller than F 32. So that's the only difference between lenses is how wide or how narrow the maximum or minimum apertures are. You will pay more for lenses, the wider the maximum aperture is. So if you have a lens that's 2.8 or has a maximum aperture that's wider than 2.8, say 1.4 or 1.2, you will pay more because the engineering that goes into a lens that has an aperture that wide is something that's going to just cost extra. It's more sophisticated and it's more difficult to make. So just something to keep in mind if you are on the market looking for lenses, For landscape photography, you're really not going to need an aperture that is wider than 2.8. And that's really if you're doing night sky photography, astro photography. For the most part, we'll again, talk about this a little bit later. You're really only going to be using apertures in this range, the middle range of the aperture scale right here. Okay. Let's jump back into how to memorize this F stop scale. Let's take a look at this first F stop here, 1.4. And you'll notice that every other aperture or stop, every other one, it doubles. If we look at 1.4, 1.4 times two is 2.8, 2.8 times two is 5.6, 5.6 times two is 11 if you are rounding, and 11 times two is 22. The entire every other F stop cure, you can memorize just by multiplying by two. Let's look at the second f stop in the F stop scale here. You'll notice the exact same thing. So every other number is doubled. Two times two is four times two is eight times two is 16 times two is 32. If you just memorize these first two numbers in the F stop scale, so 1.4 and two, then you can multiply by two and be able to remember just by doing some simple math, what all the numbers in the F stop scale are. Now, I wouldn't recommend that you rely on this for very long. It's a useful tool when you're first learning or first trying to memorize the F stop scale, but you're really going to want to know it backwards and forwards and by heart so well that you don't have to think about it when you're out in the field shooting, especially for landscape photography, when you're in circumstances where light is changing quickly, and the scene is changing, and you want to have control over your camera settings. You don't want to be getting your pen and pencil out, doing the math to figure out what your FSOp scale is. Well, let's come back to why these numbers are what they are. Like I said, they look a little bit random, especially if you are new to the F stop scale. You might be wondering, where did these numbers come from? The reason that the F stops are laid out this way is because the difference between H F stop on the scale here is what's called one stop of light. This is where it gets a little bit confusing. So stay with me. We're going to break this down. What is a stop of light? A stop of light is just a measurement of light. And what it means is that this quantity of light, it either doubles the amount of light or it cuts the amount of light in half that reaches the camera sensor. Confusing, right? Well, let's look at an example to see how this can make more sense. So let's take for example, let's say we have our camera set to F 2.8. We have our F stop set to F 2.8. Then we change the F stop to F four. So what's going on here? If you change your F stop from F 2.8 to F four, you are cutting the amount of light that reaches the image sensor in half. If you remember, as we move this way, you reduce the amount of light reaching the image sensor because that aperture is getting smaller. So every time we move from one F stop to the next on the F stop scale, we cut the amount of light entering through the camera lens in half. So it's a relative amount of light because it depends on where you are on the scale. So if you go from 2.8 to four, you cut the amount of light in half. It's not a physical quantity because it's relative to where you were at 2.8. So another example, let's say you're at F eight and you stop down to F 11. You would be cutting the amount of light in half from F eight to F 11. The way you could say that is that the difference between F eight and F 11 when it comes to the amount of light is that you are reducing the amount of light by one stop bet. Okay. Let's look at another example. Let's say you go from F 11 to F eight. So we're going from a smaller aperture to a wider aperture. So we are doubling the amount of light that gets through the lens and reaches the image sensor. If we go from one stop on the scale to the next, we are doubling the amount of light. If we go from F eight to 5.6, F 5.6, we're going to double the light again. If we went from 5.6 to F four, we would double the light again. So each time we step over to the left on the scale, we doubling the amount of light entering through the camera lens. Again, we could say, each time we move from one step on the scale to the next, we are changing the amount of light by one stop. This might take a little bit of time to sink in. Go back after you finish this lesson, rewatch this as many times as you need for this to really start to make sense to you. And we refer to stops of light, and we're referring to the amount of light when we're talking about shutter speed and ISO as well. So it's not just for aperture. Okay. That brings us to our next key concept. And when you see these key concepts come up on my presentations here, just remember, if you don't take anything else away from this lesson, the key concepts are the things that are absolutely important that you need to write down, memorize and have in your working memory. So the key concept here is each full F step on the scale represents a doubling or having the amount of light entering the camera. All right. It gets a little more confusing because when you hear F stop, it sounds like a stop of light, but these two things are not the same. F stop and a stop of light are not the same. F stop refers is a number that represents the size of the aperture. Let me have this down again. FS Stop is the size of the aperture. So the F stop tells you how much light is coming through the camera lens. Now, a stop of light is a quantity of light, and it's just relative to where you are on the F stop scale. So FSTop is the size of the aperture, so size of the hole in the lens and a stop of light refers to a quantity of how much light is passing through the lens. We've talked about F stop, but you might be at this point, a little bit confused because you might have noticed and this is where a lot of students get hung up and confused is that when you are referring to F stop, the smaller number represents a larger aperture, and a larger F stop number represents a smaller aperture. That's very counter intuitive, and that's really where your mind can get a little bit twisted here, especially when you're working in the field and you're thinking, Oh, I need less light, you might instinctively think you need a smaller F stop number, but it's really you need a bigger F stop number to reduce the amount of light exposing your image. So a larger aperture is represented by a smaller F stop, and a smaller aperture is represented by a larger F stop. Important to remember here. Bigger the F stop, the less light will reach your camera sensor, and the smaller the F stop, the more light will reach your camera sensor. Again, that is another key concept here. Increasing F stop value will reduce the exposure in your images, and decreasing F stop will reduce the exposure in your images. As we go from a larger to a smaller F stop, we go for more exposure to less exposure in our images. If you are wondering why this is, because why would a larger F stop number mean less light and a smaller F stop number mean more light? I'm not going to go into the technicalities of why this is. I will link to a guide on how this all works, how you calculate what F stop is, and where this number exactly comes from in the equation? It's not very complicated, but it's beyond the scope of an introductory lesson on FSTop, I think. But the way to think about this is that an F stop is just a fraction. So if you go back to grade school math, you might remember that when you're looking at fractions, when the number on the bottom is smaller, this is what's called the denominator of a fraction, so the number on the bottom of a fraction. The smaller it is, the bigger the number as a whole is. And the larger the denominator, the smaller the number is. So if we think about like pieces of pizza or a Pi, one half of a Pi is much larger than one 16th of a Pi. You can see as the denominator gets larger, the actual number, the actual amount of the whole, the percentage is going get smaller. And so that's just a way to think about these apertures without getting too deep in the weeds of why we have this kind of backwards system of smaller F stop is larger aperture and larger F stop is smaller aperture. Okay, so let's actually look at some real world examples here, so this will hopefully help everything sink in. All right, so what we're looking at here is a photograph of a tree, obviously. And what we have over here are the camera settings that I use to take this image. I'm going to walk you through a series of images. And for all of these images, the shutter speed and the ISO are going to be exactly the same. So they are not going to change, but the F stop is going to change. So pay attention to the F stop. So we're trying to control for shutter speed and ISO. That's not going to change. We're just going to look at the differences of when we move from one stop to the next as we move along the F stop scale. We're going to see what happens to this exact image as we change just the F stop. Right here, we're looking at F four, and this is going to be the brightest image because we are letting the most amount of light in. Then we move to F 5.6. You can see the image is a little bit darker. Remember, as we move from F four to F 5.6, we are moving by one stop of light. Again, that means we are cutting the amount of light in half. From this image to this image, the light entering the lens is cut in half. Then we cut the light and half again as we move by one stop down on the F stop scale. Now we're at F eight, the image is getting darker. We are at F 11th. And this is what I would consider a pretty well exposed photo because the brightest parts of the image look natural to my eye. They aren't over exposed or too bright, and the darkest parts of the image aren't too dark. We can really see the detail and the brightest and the darkest parts of this image. All right. So we're at F 16, now we're a little bit too dark. Again, cut the light in half again. Now at F 22, we have a very dark image because we've cut the amount of light in half again. We've gone down, let's see how many stops. We've gone one, two, three, four, five stops of light down from F four. If we hair all of these images, if we look at them all together, You can see what happens every time we move down on the F stop scale? Every time we stop down and close the aperture down and allow the amount of light in, cut it in half, each time we stop down. Again, F 11 seems to be the best exposure in this entire series of images. That is how F stop affects exposure. Now, how do you adjust F stop on your specific camera? That is a question that I can't answer for you specifically because every camera is going to be different. However, on most DSLR and mirrorless cameras, you're going to have a series of buttons and dials that will allow you to and these are on the outside of the camera, so you don't have to go in pressing buttons on your menu or on your camera screen. Typically, you can just use the dials like you see here to adjust the F stop. It's usually very simple where you could just move the dial from left to right. And the F stop, you can see right here will increase and decrease. And what I would recommend if you cannot figure out how to change F stop on your camera, just Google it. Look at your camera manual if you have it, but most camera manufacturers have the camera manuals for all of their cameras available to download or on the Internet. It's usually very easy to find, especially for, Kann and Nikon, Sony. All the big names are going to have readily available documentation online of how to change your F stop on your camera. All right. So let's review everything that we've learned in this lesson. We covered a lot here. So we covered the four elements of exposure. We covered scene luminance, F stop, shutter speed, and ISO. If you remember from the lesson, only three of these we can control. We can only control F stop, shutter speed, and ISO, the three components of three settings that control exposure on your camera. Aperture we covered is the opening in the lens through which light passes, and F stop is the number that represents the size of the aperture. We learned that these two terms F stop and aperture are not the same thing. F stop tells us how much light is entering through the lens to expose the image. The smaller the F stop, the larger the aperture, the more exposure and the brighter the image is going to be. The larger the F stop, the smaller the aperture will be, the less exposure, and the darker the image. We learned about this counter intuitive, this inverse relationship between F stop and aperture size. We learn how to adjust F stop on your camera, or at least you learned the direction that you need to look in if you need to find how to change F stop on your camera. Usually, you just need to Google it and it will come up right away. It's usually very simple. So don't stress out too much if you cannot find F stop on your camera. If you ever need help with that, just send me a message, I will most likely be able to guide you in the right direction of how to change F stop on your camera That was a lot that you learned in this lesson. And if a lot of it seems a little bit confusing, still, like I said, go back, rewatch this lesson, at least one more time. Allow it to sink in. Get your camera out, practice changing F stop, take some practice photos. Like you saw like the one I showed you demonstrated with the tree where you change from all of the different F stops on the FSop scale, going from a larger to a smaller F stop. And back again and keeping all the other exposure settings the same so you can see the changes occurring. This is going to help you internalize all of this information. It's going to help it stick a lot better. I hope you learned a lot, I hope that helped you out, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 5. Elements of Exposure: Shutter Speed: Welcome back, everyone. In this lesson, you're going to learn all about shutter speed, which is another one of the most important topics when it comes to exposure in photography. So we're going to cover a lot in this lesson. It's really important that you have a solid understanding of the basics of shutter speed and how it works. So what we'll cover in this lesson is what exactly is shutter speed? You'll have a solid understanding by the end of this lesson of what shutter speed actually is. We'll discuss the two main types of shutters that you might not be aware of that are in your camera, maybe that you have now. But something that's important to be aware of in case you want to switch from one shutter type to another or get a different type of camera that has one of these shutters. We'll talk about how shutter speed is measured. And also the shutter speed chart, which will help you understand the different exposure stops between shutter speed settings on your camera. We'll discuss the best shutter speeds for different lighting conditions, so which shutter speeds are best, depending on the times of day that you're shooting landscape photographs. And we'll also talk about how shutter speed affects exposure in your images. Really, the most important concept in this entire lesson will be how shutter speed affects exposure in your images because we're trying to create well balanced, well exposed images. And you will also learn how to control shutter speed on your particular camera. Again, I won't be able to show you exactly how to do it on your specific camera because I don't know what type of camera you have, but I'll guide you in the right direction on how to figure that out. Okay. So let's take a look again at this diagram that you should be pretty familiar with already. This again is the anatomy of a DSLR camera, which you learned about earlier in this course, and we've talked about already seen luminance, and we've talked about FSTOp, in terms of the two elements so far, that impact exposure. FSTOp, so far is the only setting that you've learned in this course on how you can control exposure. Well, Shutter speed is another one of those elements of exposure that you are able to control. We've talked a little bit about shutter speed. And here I've indicated, again, as you've learned already that this little blue box indicates a shutter in a DSLR camera. It's more complicated than this, and some cameras don't even have a physical shutter, and we'll get into that later in this lesson, but essentially represents the movement of the shutter out of the way of the image sensor, so the light can go all the way through the camera, hit the image sensor, and the image can be exposed. So what is shutter speed? We've talked about the shutter, but what is shutter speed? Well, shutter speed, a lot of times you'll hear it called the amount of time that the shutter is open. But like I said, not all cameras actually have physical shutters. So if a camera doesn't have a physical shutter, then you can't really define shutter speed in terms of how long the shutter is open or is moved away from the image sensor. So really what shutter speed is. It's the amount of time that the camera sensor or film, if you're using a camera with film, but mostly in this course, we're focusing on digital cameras is exposed to light. So light comes in through the lens, it hits the image sensor, and the amount of time that the image sensor is collecting that light to expose the image, that is the shutter speed. And another way that you can think about shutter speed is if you think of, say, a door in your house. If you imagine you're in your house, all the lights are off, all the windows are closed, it's pitch black. But it's a sunny day outside, and you open your front door and all of this light floods in, and the inside of your house gets really bright and you can see everything. And then you close the door back up and it gets dark in your house again. You can kind of think of shutter speed as the amount of time that you opened your door. So the amount of time that you've opened your door and allowed light to enter your house. If we're talking about shutter speed in terms of time, it's the amount of time, then this time is going to be measured in seconds. Shutter speed is going to be measured in seconds. Because shutter speed is usually so brief in photography. Usually for landscapes, for the most part, you're shooting during the day, it's not going to be more than a second. So we measure it in terms of seconds or fractions of a second. So when we start talking about shutter speed numbers, settings that you'll have on your camera, those numbers are referring to me in seconds. We Let's discuss really briefly before we get into our shutter speed settings. Let's talk about what I mentioned before, which is the types of shutters that you can find in your camera. There's really two main types of shutters that you'll find in most modern DSLR or mirrorless cameras. The first one is a mechanical shutter, and that's pretty much the type of shutter that we've discussed so far. So a mechanical shutter is just a physical barrier, which is usually a curtain made out of two blades that cover the image sensor. So typically, what will happen is the blade on the bottom will be lifted, I'll drop down. The image will be exposed, and then the top curtain will come down and close the shutter. So the reason that there's two curtains in these mechanical shutters is because it allows the entire image sensor to be exposed evenly. You only have one curtain, then as the curtain comes down and then up again, if it were to work that way, then The certain parts of the image sensor would get more light, more exposure than other parts. You want an entirely even exposure across the entire image sensor. You don't have to worry too much about the physics of how that works, but I just know that a mechanical shutter physically blocks the image sensor from light, and then it opens to allow the light to reach the image sensor, and then it closes back up again. This is all as you might know, initiated when you press the shutter button on your camera. The other main type of shutter is an electronic shutter. And this you'll find in mirrorless cameras. Some DSLRs have a version of an electronic shutter. And an electronic shutter doesn't have blades or a curtain covering the image sensor. Really the way it works is electronically, like the name suggests, the electronics in the camera will start and stop the exposure process. So there's no need to have something blocking the light. The camera just tells the sensor, essentially to just turn on and off when it wants to start collecting light to create the image. Now, why would you want one over the other? For landscape photography, don't worry too much about the differences between these two types of shutters. Electronic shutters, they are great if you're doing, say, wildlife photography or high speed photography, which also would be wildlife or sports photography. Anytime you're in what's called burst mode or continuous shooting, where you're taking lots of photos really, really, really quickly. We're talking in fractions of a second. In Landscape photography, we don't typically take photographs that quickly because our subjects aren't moving, or at least they're not moving very quickly, say if you have something moving like a tree branch or water or something, we still don't need to take photographs really, really quickly, and we're also usually not worried about sound because we're not worried about scaring animals away. It's just One way they can be advantageous though for landscape photographers is that because you don't have a physically moving shutter, you're not going to have the vibration, the small vibrations, which are for the most part, not extremely noticeable. But when the shutter, as you can see in this left image here, when the shutter opens and closes, it can cause really tiny vibrations, which can cause the image to become slightly fuzzy. That's due to something called motion blur, which you'll learn about later in this course. But L landscape photographers typically want the sharpest photographs possible. So using an electronic shutter, in some cases or in a lot of cases can be highly advantageous. There are some downsides to using electronic shutters. The main ones have to do with how quickly you can take images. So again, we're not really concerned about taking images extremely quickly, so you don't have to worry about that. Now, a lot of cameras these days, especially ones with mechanical and electronic shutters, you can switch between the two. So this is just something to be aware of because it's really important to understand, you really want to master photography, how your camera works. Maybe understanding if you have a mechanical or an electronic and a lot of cameras have a mix of these two called a electronic front curtain shutter is just like a mix of a mechanical and electronic. DSLRs have this. Just something to be aware of, so you know how the shutter and your camera works. And if you need to switch between the two, depending on the type of if you maybe do some wildlife or other types of photography with your camera, or would like to even just take the slightest bit of vibration out of your images. Let's talk about this shutter speed chart. What you have here on this column. These are all of the settings, the shutter speed settings that you'll find on your camera. So these settings are these are the shutter speeds. So these numbers represent time, as we've talked about, shtter speed is just a measurement of time. And these are just time in seconds, like we've talked about. So this means 1 second, shutter speed of 1 second, 2 seconds. We go up to faster shutter speeds at the top of the chart. We have one 500th of a second, one, 1000th of a second, and even faster. So these are longer stter speeds all the way up to 30 seconds. And these are what you'll typically find the minimum and maximum on most cameras. So most cameras have a maximum shutter speed of 30 seconds, and most have a minimum of 14000 or the fastest sutter speed is one 4000th of a second. That's kind of hard to It's a mouthful. You'll notice with all of these shutter speeds, you can remember them because they are just getting halved and doubled from one to the next. So if we start at one, just to make it easy, the next shutter speed. So if we look over at our exposure stops chart, this is just showing We've talked about in previous lessons. In the last lesson you learned about exposure stops between one F stop to the next. Here, the same thing applies. From one shutter speed on the shutter speed scale to the next, we are increasing by one stop. If we go from one shutter speed to a faster shutter speed, we are decreasing by one stop. Let's break this down a little bit. Let's start with a 1 second shutter speed. If we double our shutter speed, so if we go from 1 second to 2 seconds, we are literally doubling the amount of time that we are allowing light to enter the camera. Because we are doubling the amount of light, it means we are increasing by one exposure stop. And you'll notice as we go down the shutter speed chart to longer shutter speed, we're doubling each time. So we go 2-4 to eight, each time, we are doubling the amount of time that light is allowed to reach the image sensor. If we look at this side of the diagram, we're adding more light, allowing more light in and less light in as we go to faster shutter speeds. So the same applies going in the opposite direction. So if we go from one, and we decrease by one stop, we're having the amount of light that reaches the image sensor, we cut that amount of light in half again, if we go from one half to one quarter. We go from one arth to one eighth, we cut it in half again in one eighth to one 15th, we cut it in half again. It's not 1/16, just it has to do with rounding these numbers. But if we keep going one half of one 15th is one 30th, if you are fuzzy on your fractions, Just remember that the bigger the number on the bottom of the fraction gets, the smaller the number is getting. We're getting into shorter and shorter times here. Really, you don't have to memorize it if you just remember one of your shutter speeds is one, you can go to one half, half all of those settings, or you can double all of those settings. That's just an easy way to remember this entire shutter speed scale on your camera. Most cameras will allow you to go half stops or sometimes one third stops in between. But just starting with one, remember how this works in your mind, so that when you're out in the field, shooting your images, you can think, Okay, what is one stop down? Well, I have to do is just cut my shutter speed in half, and that's the number. That I need to choose for my shutter speed. When would you choose a really fast shutter speed? Some of these really fast shutter speeds up here? On a really bright sunny day, when you have a lot of light coming into the camera. I have really high scene luminants, our first element of exposure. I really high scene luminant, a lot of light coming in, then we're not going to need to collect is much light. So we're going to need a faster shutter speed. If we're shooting later in the day, say golden hour, then we are going to need some longer shutter speeds. We're going to need more light coming and reaching the image sensor in order to get an image that's well balanced. Okay. And if we're shooting, say in the middle of the night, and we want to do some astro photography, star photography, then we're going to have to have shutter speeds all the way into the 32nd range because there's such little light that you need all 30 seconds to collect all of that light coming from the stars to properly expose your image. So this is a key concept with shutter speed and exposure, really summarized right here that you need to understand if there's only one thing that you remember from this Lesson, It's that when you have a longer shutter speed, the shutter is open longer. Or if you have an electronic shutter, it allows light to hit the sensor longer. And the image will be brighter because more light is hitting the camera sensor. So we get a brighter image. We have a shorter stter speed, less light is allowed to reach the image sensor, and the darker the image will become. Let's look at some practical examples just to demonstrate what this looks like, if you were out shooting. So this is just a simple example. Some photos I shot literally in my backyard, not the greatest photos in the world, but just to dem it for demonstration purposes. Here we have an image, and we're going to walk through a series of images with different shutter speeds, but all of the other exposure settings are going to be kept the same. The F stop is going to be the same in the ISO is going to be the same. The only thing that's going to change as we walk through these is the shutter speed. So this image was shot at one half of a second. You can see that this image is really bright, and it's definitely over exposed. The shutter speed was too long in this case. So if I didn't change any other settings and I wanted to darken this image, I'm going to have to shorten or speed up my shutter speed. And you can see in the background here. You know, the tree is actually pretty well exposed, but the background here, we've lost all the detail on this garage. You can't even see the bricks anymore. Let's reduce our shutter speed by one half, so we're going down one exposure stop. We go to one quarter of a second. You can see the image is a little bit darker. The other settings haven't changed, and we start to get a little more detail in the brick wall back here. If we stop down one more time, if we cut the shutter speed in half to one eighth of a second, can see the image is a little bit darker, and this is what I would consider decently well exposed photo. This is a very high contrast scene. So there are ways to work around this that we'll talk about later in this course, how to get the background and the foreground decently exposed. But this is well balanced so far. If we cut that in half again, down another exposure stop to one 15th of a second. The foreground, the tree is starting to get a little bit too dark, but the background actually looks pretty good, was decently exposed. We go down one more stop to one 30th of a second, a faster shutter speed. Starts to get too dark here, and then finally one 60th of a second. This image is definitely under exposed. We do not have enough light reaching the image sensor to get an exposure that's properly balanced, so we get enough detail in the foreground and in the background. If we look at all of these images together, compare them, you can see how just going from one, two, three, four, five, stop. Exposure stops down? What a dramatic difference it is and just five exposure stops here in shtter speed? You can see how the shorter your stter speed is, the darker your image is going to be, and the longer your shtter speed is, the more light, the brighter your images are going to be. So how do you change shtter speed on your camera? And like I mentioned in the beginning of this lesson. You're going to everyone's going to have a different camera, but for the most part, DSLRs and mayor list cameras will have a dial. They'll have two dials, and one will control the F stop, and one will control the shutter. So you can use your thumb to adjust either your shutter or your F stop and your index finger to adjust your sutter or your F stop, depending on how your camera is set up. And this makes it easy to really without thinking about it, you have your thumb on F stop, your your pointer finger on the shutter. You can change those two settings really, really quickly and easily without having to, you know, go into your camera menu or any kind of complicated steps to change your shutter speed. So it should be quite straightforward and simple. But as always, go and just Google your camera make and model, how to change the shutter speed. It should be extremely simple. Google will point you in the right direction. If you have your camera manual, a lot of times the camera manual will be online, so you can just take a look at what your camera manual says online. All right. Let's review what you have learned in this lesson. The shutter speed. Shutter speed is the amount of time that your camera sensor or film is exposed to lights, the amount of time that the image sensor is collecting light information from the scene that you are photographing. There are two main types of shutters that you should be aware of that you can potentially switch between depending on the type of camera you have, a mechanical, or an electronic shutter. Definitely go look at your camera manual, Google, what type of shutter or shutters your camera has. Shutter speed is measured in seconds and fractions of a second. Typically, a camera will have a maximum shutter speed of 30 seconds and a minimum of one 4000th of a second with one third and one half exposure stops in between. Longer shutter speeds create brighter photos, and shorter shutter speeds create darker photos. And finally, the way you adjust shutter speed on your camera, just Google it. If you are ever in doubt Google it, you'll most likely find the answer. So that is really the most fundamental, the most important concepts regarding shutter speed. When you're trying to control exposure in your images, that is how shutter speed works. If any of this didn't make sense to you, go back, rewatch this lesson as many times as you need to. Really internalize it. Go out and practice with your camera, perhaps do an experiment like I showed you in this lesson, where you keep all of your settings the same and then just change your shutter speed and see how that works for different lighting situations. Practice is the best best best way to learn this. So that's it for now. I will see you in the next lesson on IST. 6. Elements of Exposure: ISO: Hey, there y'all, and welcome to this lesson on ISO. ISO is the fourth element of exposure that we've discussed in this course so far. And of these four elements of exposure, it's one of three camera settings that you can use to control exposure when you are taking your images. So let's look at what we're going to cover in this lesson. This is an extremely important lesson. So we're going to start with what ISO means, just so you understand where that turn comes from, and we'll go in depth into what ISO is, how it work, and how it affects exposure. This is really the most important part of ISO is learning how to control it to control exposure in our photographs. We'll talk about the biggest misconception about ISO, that you definitely want to going to stay around this lesson to learn because it is something that you will hear over and over incorrectly when you're learning photography. We'll talk about the best ISO for landscape images and how to adjust ISO on your camera. First, let's go back to our famous diagram here that should be pretty familiar with. We've covered, like I mentioned, all three elements of exposure so far, so the scene luminans, the F stop, the shutter speed, and now fourth, and finally, we're at ISO. What does ISO mean? Well, ISO, the acronym ISO comes from the international organization for standardization. And this organization originally set the standard for ISO in film. So back in film days, used to have film speeds, and the ISO referred to the sensitivity of the film to light. Now when we use digital cameras, it works a little bit differently as we'll discuss. But just so you know, that's where the name comes. It comes from this organization that used to standardize ISO for film. What is ISO? The most simple way to think about ISO is it's a setting on your camera that brightens or darkens your image. You can use it to brighten or darken your image. And it's really as simple as that. We will talk a little more about what this amplification means in this definition here. So the technical definition is a camera setting that brightens or darkens a photo by amplifying the light that reaches the image sensor. We'll break down what all of that means. But for now, just know that ISO brightens or darkens your image. So how does ISO work? Well, ISO works a little bit differently from your other camera settings because it doesn't actually have to do with how much a light is being collected by your image sensor. So if we take a look at this diagram, we have the first three elements of exposure. We have the scene luminant, so the light coming in, reflecting off the scene and coming into your camera sensor. We have F stop, which controls how large your aperture is, so how much light is allowed through the lens, which eventually is able to hit your image sensor and then be collected by your image sensor. And then we have shutter speed, which is the amount of time that that light is allowed to hit your image sensor. So if we think of your image sensor and your camera like a bucket collecting water, and the light coming in is just the water. We are just filling that bucket up with water. In this case, we're just filling that bucket up with light information. And the light is the signal that tells your image sensor what to do essentially. It's a lot more complicated than that. There's a lot of physics involved and how that works. Don't worry about that unless you are interested in how image sensors work and collect light in the form of signal and create the image. I'll provide some resources. If you want to learn more about that, but just understand that the image sensor collects light from these three elements of exposure. Again, these two, you can control this one you cannot control. Then once once your image sensor reads this light information. It takes that information and it amplifies it. Another way to think about this is say you have a radio an FM radio, and you're listening to a song on the radio. The radio is collecting the information from the airwaves. But if you want to listen to your radio, if you want to hear the music, louder, you're going to have to turn up the volume on your radio. And that's kind of what ISO is doing. ISO will take this light information, the signal, and turn up the volume, so to speak. And when you turn up the ISO, it brightens your image. And ISO comes into play really when you're working in low light situations. So when you need to when you can't change your other camera settings and you need to increase your image brightness, ISO, especially when it's dark out, ISO will help boost up that image brightness. Again, if we look at our anatomy of our camera, you can see that we have our first three elements of exposure that affect how much light is coming in from the stain. And then once we collect this light information, the signal, the ISO amplifies that light to brighten your image. So we turn up the ISO if we want to brighten our image. And really the biggest misconception about ISO, which you'll hear from photographers all over the Internet, all over YouTube, articles. You'll always hear ISO be called Sensor sensitivity. You'll hear photographers say that ISO is when you turn up ISO, you are increasing the sensitivity of your camera to or your camera image sensor to light. Your cameras image sensor, the sensitivity never changes. So when you hear that the ISO is sensor sensitivity, just ignore that. You are not ever increasing the sensitivity of your camera sensor to light. You are only amplifying that light. You are turning up the volume of that light. Something to be aware of because, like I've said before, if you want to master photography, it's important to know what's going on inside your camera and to know when you're getting false information from these other photography sources. So now you know what's actually going on with ISO. Here we have an ISO chart. The idea here is similar to what we've looked at with the FS Stop chart and the shutter speed chart. We have a list of ISO ISO values that you will find on your camera. So these are the ISO settings that you'll find on your camera. You might have lower ISOs or higher ISOs. In fact, if you have a professional grade camera, you will likely have. SO that's lower than 100 and ISO that's higher than 6,400. If you notice every time you go from one stop to the next, so each one of each jump from one block to the next is one exposure stop. You'll notice that we are doubling the ISO as we go up the ISO scale, the ISO chart. And what's going on here is it's not like shutter speed, we are doubling the amount of a light, like we've talked about. ISO doesn't have to do with allowing light to hit the sensor. We are just doubling the brightness. So it's still considered an exposure stop from one ISO to the next. And this list of ISOs here, this is what's called the native ISO. And native ISO is just the range of ISO settings you have on your camera. So your camera goes from 100 ISO to 6,400 ISO. That is the native ISO on your camera. When you like we've discussed, when you increase ISO, you increase the image brightness. So if we go from 100 ISO to 400 ISO, we are essentially increasing our exposure by 12 exposure stops. Look over here, you can see, we are increasing by two exposure stop. If we go from 800 ISO to 200 ISO, we are decreasing by two exposure stop. Now, when would you want to use ISO 100 versus ISO 6,400? Very similar to what we've seen before with shutter speed and F stop. When we're shooting on a really bright sunny day, you're going to want to keep your ISO low. We're going to want to keep it really as low as possible. And in the next lesson, we'll talk about why you want to keep your ISO as low as possible because you do start to get penalized in a way as you go up to higher ISOs. Don't worry about that too much for now. Just know that when you're using manual mode, start on a really low ISO and then start to work your way up as you need to. If you're shooting on a really bright sunny day, you're definitely going to be able to use, or I can't say definitely, because every example in photography is different. But you're going to want to most likely use a low ISO because you have lots of light coming in from the scene, and you'll be able to let in lots of light with your shutter speed and your aperture. We'll talk about how to balance all of these settings in a future lesson. We talk about the exposure triangle. But for the most part, we're going to be safe with a low ISO in a bright sunny day. We to need a brighter image. If we start shooting at golden hour, when we're shooting a scene with a lower light, say sunrise or sunset, you might need to bump your ISO up to two or 400. This is to increase your brightness in your image. And you might be wondering, why can't I just brighten my image up in post processing because you can do that type of thing in photoshop and light room, it doesn't work the same way. You're going to get much better image quality if you get the correct brightness or exposure in camera first, and then make those adjustments to brightness later in post processing. You really want to nail it when you're out in the field. First. So just something to keep in mind there. If you are shooting at nighttime, Even if you have a really long shutter speed, like we talked about in the last lesson for night photography, so you have a 32nd exposure. You still might have an image that's too dark. So you might need to increase your ISO to 6,400 or even higher. So definitely recommend after this lesson. Look at your camera, see what the highest ISO is. You can Google it, but just get your camera out and just start scrolling through your ISOs and see the highest one that you can get to. Can also check out what the lowest ISO is on your camera. The lowest ISO is usually for most cameras, it's 100. More professional grade cameras will get down to 64, maybe lower my camera. Full frame amors camera goes down to 64, and this is called the base ISO. The base ISO is just your lowest native ISO. So remember, native is the whole scale. If we're looking at the entire scale, the lowest ISO on that scale is going to be your base ISO. And the reason it's important to know what your base ISO is is because this is the ISO where light is not being amplified. And you get better image quality, the less amount the light is being amplified. Okay, we'll talk about that in the next lesson. But the more you start to amplify the light, the lower your image quality is going to be because you are digitally creating more information. You're not using the information that's coming directly from the scene. The camera kind of has to figure out how to fill in the gaps when you brighten the image. Let's go through a series of images just very briefly, like we've done before. So you can see what increasing your ISO will do to the exposure of your images. These, like you've seen in the last few lessons with Shutter speed and FSTop, is just a simple series where I have kept shutter speed the same. F Stop is the same. And the only thing that's going to change is ISO. So we're going to look at this image of this little plant here. And we're going to watch what happens to ISO as we increase ISO and keep all of the other exposure settings the same. So we start at ISO 100, which is likely the base ISO on your camera. Then we move to ISO 200. We start to get a little bit brighter. So ISO 100 is too dark. We start to get a little bit better exposure. ISO 100, we're starting to get actually more of a well balanced exposure. ISO 800, perhaps a little bit too bright, but you can see how we're starting to lose some detail in the background. ISO 1,600 starts to get definitely too bright here. We're losing detail in the background and maybe some of the detail in the plant folder here. And ISO 3,200 definitely too bright. We have over exposed our image because we have blown out the highlights. We've lost the detail in the highlights. And some of the highlights on the plate and the planter. So if we compare all of these images side by side, you can see what happens when we go from our base ISO. Technically, the base on my camera is 64, but we'll pretend it's 100 as we go from base ISO all the way to 3,200 ISO, increasing by one exposure stop each time. So the difference between one, two, three, four, five exposure stops is really dramatic. How do you find ISO or adj ISO on your camera? Well, like we've talked about before, I can't tell you exactly how to do it on your camera because I don't know what kind of camera you have. But usually the way this works, if you have a DSLR or a Morless camera is there's a button on the top of your camera that'll say ISO, and you press the button down. Then while you're holding the button down, you just move one of the dials, either the dial for your thumb, which might be back here or the dial for your index finger. And as you rotate that dial, you will change ISO. Again, if you don't know how to do this on your camera, just Google it. You can find your manual or likely some very simple tutorial that will show you how to do that on your camera. All right, let's review what we've learned in this lesson on ISO. The most important key concepts that you need to take away about ISO. ISO is in its most simple definition, it's a camera setting used to brighten or darken an image. That's at the most fundamental level, that's all that's going on. You use it to brighten or darken your image. Increasing ISO increases image brightness and vice versa. So when you turn ISO up, you increase the brightness of your image, and when you reduce ISO, you darken your image down. ISO amplifies the light information, also called the signal gathered by your image sensor. If you think about it like a radio, you have the radio waves transmitted by the radio station. They're collected by your radio. But do you want to listen to your song loud or you're going to have to turn up the volume on your radio? And ISO is analogous to that, where you're just turning up the volume with your camera, you're just turning up the light information. You're amplifying that signal. Unlike F stop and shutter speed, ISO doesn't directly affect how much light reaches the camera sensor. Remember, we control F stop. We control how much light enters the lens, which can then hit the image sensor. And we can also control how much time the light hits the image sensor through our shutter speed. But ISO doesn't control how much light our image sensor collects. It only takes that information and it amplifies it. The sensitivity of your camera sensor never changes. Only the amplification of light changes. The sensitivity of your image sensor is always the same. So you'll hear this a lot. And this is not correct. You do not change the sensitivity of your camera sensor. I used to be that way with film where you change the sensitivity of light with film, but with digital cameras, that's not what's going on. And your base ISO is the lowest native ISO on your camera. This is where there's no amplification of light. This is where you're going to get the best image quality, which you'll talk about next. But go check out on your camera what your base ISO. What's the lowest native ISO? You're having trouble figuring that out. Google. You camera Ming model, and Google with the base ISO is, but you should be able to just scroll through all of your ISOs. See the lowest ISO you can get to, and that will be your base ISO. Usually, it's 100. All right, so that is about it for our lesson on ISO. In the next few lessons, we're going to start to combine all of the information that you've learned so far in this course. So the next few lessons are going to be very important because we're going to combine F stop, shutter speed, ISL into something that's called the exposure, where you'll learn how to create well balanced, well exposed images using these three settings. But first, we need to discuss something called image properties, which are going to come into play when you start making adjustments. To your exposure settings, Stop shutter speed, and ISO. So we need to discuss these image properties first, and we'll talk about that in the next lesson. So I look forward to seeing you there. 7. Image Properties: There, and welcome back to the class. In this lesson, you are going to learn about something called image properties. And this is just a term that I use to describe all of the different effects that your exposure settings can have on your images that aren't related to exposure. So, we've talked about how FSOp, shutter speed, and ISO, all control exposure in your images, so the brightness and darkness of how your photographs turn out. But the caveat is that these three exposure settings can also have what you might consider dide effects. They have additional effects that they'll have on your images. And it's important to understand these because it's going to impact the exposure settings that you choose. And this will make more sense when we get into what these image properties are. So very briefly, what we're going to cover in this lesson is what image properties are. The three image properties that you need to understand, which will have a profound impact on the camera settings that you choose. This is very important to understand these three image properties. We'll discuss how each image property correlates with an exposure setting. So each F stop shutter speed and ISO, each have their own specific image properties that you need to know about. And how to use image properties for creative and artistic effects. So if you want to be able to express yourself more creatively, you're going to want to learn how to use and manipulate these image properties. And we will also talk about the least desirable image property that you always want to avoid. So this is the one that you want to avoid having in your images. And by knowing about it, you'll be able to prevent introducing it into your photographs. All right. So as a very quick review, what you've learned in this course so far is that there are three settings that control exposure in your images. These are the three settings that you can control when you're trying to balance exposure when you're taking a photograph. The first is aperture. The second is shutter speed, and the third is ISO. This should be very familiar to you by now, if not, definitely go back and rewatch the first part of this course, so you understand this concept. So what are image properties? Image properties are the various characteristics and qualities of an image that are influenced by your camera settings. So what does that mean? Well, it means that our exposure settings don't just affect exposure. Our camera settings also influence certain qualities of our image. And some of those qualities, as we'll talk about, include how sharp our images are, if the foreground and the background are sharp, or if only say the foreground or only the background are sharp, it also controls what movement looks like in our images. There are three types of image properties. Each one correlates with one of our exposure settings. The first is depth of field, and we'll talk about all three of these throughout this lesson. So just very briefly, the first is depth of field, and depth of field is controlled by F stop. Our second image property is called motion blur, and motion blur is controlled by shutter speed. And the third is called noise, and noise is controlled by ISO. So this is just a bird's eye view of what we're going to be talking about. We're going to get into what depth of field motion blur and noise are later in this lesson. So first, we're going to start with F stop. And F stop, like we just saw, controls depth of field. So if you're unfamiliar with depth of f with what depth of field is, essentially what depth of field is, it's the distance between the nearest and the furest objects in a scene that appear sharp in an image. So what does that really mean in simple terms? Well, if we look at this photograph here, you can see that the foreground is blurry, and the background is blurry. But this section right here in the middle is in focus. So likely when this photograph was taken, the focus point was somewhere around here. And so this part is very sharp, and we lost focus in the background and the foreground. So the depth of field is the section that is sharp. It's a really All it is. And especially at this point, this is all you have to understand. Later in this course, you're going to learn about or in future courses when you start learning about how to create the sharpest image as possible. We'll get a lot more into depth of field and how to maximize depth of field and your images, all of that stuff. So all you have to know right now is just the section of your image that is sharp. You need foo So you can have really two types of depth of field. You can have shallow depth of field, which is where a very small part of your photograph is in focus. So in this image right here, you can see the foreground, all these flowers and grasses are really sharp, and the mountains in the background are not sharp. So the depth of field was very small. It was very shallow. We have a small section, sliver of our photograph that's sharp. And this image has a deep depth of field. Everything in this image is shark. That's because we have a very large or very deep depth of field. And typically, in landscape photography, when we're doing these grand landscape scenes, like this one, we want to have a deep depth of field so that we can get the foreground and the background in focus. So how do you control depth of field, with your FSop, we've talked in our aperture F stop lesson, all about how aperture works, how F stop works. So this scale should be pretty familiar to you. If you're a little rusty on this, go back and watch your F stop lesson, aperture lesson. But when we're talking about F Stop in terms of how it controls Depth field, what's going on here, and the most important concept you need to take away from this is that when you have a very wide open aperture, which correlates to a small F stop. You have a decreased depth of field. You have a very shallow depth of field. Only a sliver of your image is going to be in focus. When you start getting to very narrow apertures or larger F stop values, you're going to increase your depth of field. So for these big grand landscape, you will likely want to reduce the size of your aperture or increase your F stop in order to get everything in focus. What that looks like, for example, is, In this photograph, you can see the flowers in the foreground are in very sharp focus. Everything the background is soft and fuzzy. That's because a large aperture was used. A small etop was used to take this photograph. So we can only get just a small part in focus. And in this image, we have a much larger depth of field. The grasses in the foreground are very sharp, and the mountains in the background are very sharp. So this was taken with an F stop, probably around F 16, so that this entire scene could be in focus. We have a large depth of field. So that is the most important takeaway in terms of how FSTop controls depth of field. And so depth of field is the image property that you want to take into consideration when you are adjusting your aperture. L et's talk about shutter speed, the image properties associated with shutter speed. So shutter speed affects how moving objects appear in your photos. So if you have something moving like water or branches swaying in the wind flowers, anytime you have a really windy scene outdoors, there's probably going to be something moving around. In this image right here, the northern light. You have something moving through the sky. Clouds. Another example, clouds, even though they're not moving very quickly, they are still moving. Shutter speed is going to affect how these moving objects appear. And in particular, the image property associated with shutter speed is something called motion blur. Motion blur is just the effect you get when something is moving in your scene. So all of this that you see here. The way the movement appears, the streaking here is what you would call motion blur. So, for example, In this photograph on the right, we have a photograph taken at night. These are stars in the sky. But the reason that they look streaked. They have motion blur is because the earth is rotating on its axis, right? So if you're taking photographs at night, you have a really long shutter speed. You might have something of 30 seconds or even longer. So in that time, something like this would be much longer than 30 seconds. In that time, if you're taking it over minutes or even hours, you have a dramatic change in the position of the stars as the earth is rotating on its axis. So, for example, in this image, when the shutter button was pressed and the exposure started, the star was right here in the sky. And when the exposure was finished, the star was right here in the sky. So for the duration of when the shutter was open or when the image was being exposed, for the entire shutter speed, the star had moved in its position. And so this streaking is a prime example of what you would call motion blur. The shutter speed, when it comes to motion blur, the key concept that you need to understand is that the faster your shutter speed is, you're going to freeze a moving object. So it's going to appear sharper. And you have a very fast shutter. There's not going to be a lot of time for an object to change position. So it's going to appear as it's frozen in time. There's going to be no streaking, depending on how fast the shtter speed is. So the faster the stter speed is, the less streaking, the less motion blur you're going to see in your photographs. When you have a very slow shutter speed, like we just saw in the star trails at in the night photograph of the stars moving, you're going to have lots of motion blur. So shutter speed allows you to control the degree of motion blur in your images. And this is going to be up to you as the artist to determine how much motion blur you want in your photograph. Mm. Because it can be desirable either way. And we'll talk about why you might want motion blur and why you might not want that in your photographs. So for example, Here is just a little tiny waterfall I shot that shows you the difference between what motion blur looks like when you have different shutter speeds. So on the left, for this scene, I set the stter speed to 2 seconds. So you get this nice stilky water effect. You can see the water smoothing out here. And a lot of time landscape photographers prefer this stilky smooth water effect in their images. Some photographers don't, so don't feel like you have to copy what everyone else is doing. Some photographers, you might prefer more of a sharper crisper water image, say of a waterfall, like you see here, we have a lot more detail in the water, and we have a lot more detail in the pool that's occurring below the waterfall. It's a really just personal preference, but you can see the difference. This was taken at 2 seconds, and this was taken at one tenth of a second. So much faster shutter speed. We froze this motion of the water coming down from this little baby waterfall here. You can create some really cool effects by using motion blur. And here are just a couple of examples. One way I like to use motion blur is with clouds. We've looked at this image before in this course, but I believe I set this to about a 32nd exposure, and I just allowed these clouds were moving really, really slowly. So it created this almost like abstract this cool abstract effect, kind of introducing this feeling of motion, more of an artistic look that I was going for in this photograph, which I really like. I really like having this creative aspect to my photographs. Mm hmm. In this image right here, the reason it looks kind of foggy and misty is because the tide was coming in and coming out. And if you set along exposure, say on a coastal scene like that. You can introduce more mood, more softening. This is something again that comes down to personal preference. Another photographer might have liked the look of just the tide being frozen in time. But again, this comes down to what emotion you're trying to create in your images, and that's a topic for another lesson, another course. You can also create abstract effects with motion blur. So this photo on the left was taken in a blizzard and it created because the snow was falling so quickly. It created this snow globe effect, especially with a longer shutter speed. It softened the image, but made it a little bit more dramatic. It a little bit more mysterious, because you can't really see the trees in the background anymore, but you kind of can So I really like the way that this image looked when I lengthen the shutter speed. This is an image of water where the shutter speed was lengthened. You can kind of tell it's still water. But because the shutter is just blowing up, you have these really cool, almost, like, flowing movement effects. It's meant to be almost, like, have you question what's going on. And a lot of times, for the most part, that's what abstract images are trying to do. They're trying to get you to question and go a little bit deeper into what's going on in the image rather than just like the literal presentation of the image. And then we have something called intentional camera movement. This is, again, it overlaps with the abstract idea. We're creating mysterious kind of makes a viewer question, like, what is going on in here? But this is this occurs when the scene isn't moving, but the photographer will deliberately move the camera, say, While the shutter is open or while the image is being exposed. In this image, the camera was moved up and down. This is just a forest scene, so you can move the camera up and down. And then in this image, the camera was moved side to side. So you can create a lot of really cool effects by doing this what's called ICM, but you have to understand how motion blur work and what movement looks like when your camera shutter is open, when the image is being exposed. All right. So our third image property relates to ISO. Mm. ISO controls something called noise. And noise is something that you'll see when you get to really high ISOs on your cameras like this grainy look, speckled look, and it's really just an artifact. It's not something that's coming from the scene. So the best way to think about this, if that doesn't make sense is kind of, like, static on the radio. When we talked in our ISO lesson about how ISO amplifies light. And we talked about the analogy of using a radio and turning up the volume as equivalent to amplifying the light. Well, sometimes we get static on the radio, right? So when you have kind of this really high static going on? A? Not exactly the same, but it's kind of compare it to what's going on with image noise. And image noise, unlike depth of field and shutter speed, which you can use creatively and are not a good or a bad thing either way. Image noise is generally considered a bad thing. It's generally considered a penalty for having to boost your ISO to higher levels. So you can see this image. If we compare these two images here, and this might be a little bit hard to see on your screen, and these images are really blown up. But this image is taken at really low ISO. The basest ISO on most cameras is 100. You can see it's very sharp in the details here. But when this photograph was taken at a very, very high ISO, so the highest ISO in my camera is 25,600, which is extremely high. You can see that the details start to get fuzzy. It's not as crisp. You get these little grainy artifacts introduced into the image. This is the most important thing you need to understand about ISO and noise, the image property for ISO being noise. Then you have a low ISO, and we talked about this in the ISO lesson. So you need a refresher, go back and watch that lesson. But when we are working with lower ISOs, we're not amplifying the light. Mm. At base ISO, we're not, but at lower ISOs, we're not amplifying it that much. So we're not going to have a lot of noise in our images. When you start shooting at much higher ISOs, you will start to see noise in your image. So in order to increase your image quality, you're going to want to shoot at your lower ISOs. There's really no reason to increase your ISO unless you absolutely have to because of your other camera settings. So you need to balance your exposure. Does noise really matter? So you'll hear a lot about trying to prevent noise in your images. But a lot of this information comes from, you know, years ago when cameras didn't do the best job of preventing noise when you increase ISO. So you know a lot of modern cameras, especially full framed professional grade cameras. You're really not going to see noise in your images, even at the higher ISOs. You will. You will see it, but it's going to be so slight. And really it's only going to be really noticeable if you blow your images up, so you're going to print a photograph really large. That's when you will start seeing a degradation in image quality. So can you plan on printing your images really large. Definitely take the ISO seriously, or at least trying to keep it low at base seriously. Most people, you know, post their photographs on Instagram, don't print their images, at least most of their images. So if you're just keeping your images on, posting them to social media or your personal portfolio, which I highly recommend. If you're viewing these images online, you're not really going to notice noise even when the photograph was taken at a really high ISO, and you're using a really good camera. The other thing is, there are some really amazing software out these days that can remove noise pretty effectively from your images. So if you're in a situation where you really have to increase the ISO, If you're not doing night photography, you're really most likely never going to be in a scenario where you have to get really, really high ISOs that cause a problem. But if you are sensitive to ISO and you really want to reduce noise in your images and in your for whatever reason, you need a really high ISO, and you want to remove the noise from your images, something like TpA can do a fantastic job, it uses artificial intelligent now, which is, you know, taking over, obviously, but it's using AI to remove noise from your images, and I've used it for several years now, and it is fantastic. All right. So that about wraps up this lesson. So let's cover what you've learned today. First, you learn that aperture, shutter speed, ISO control two things. They control exposure, which you've pretty much learned for the entire part of this course up until now. And they also control image property. So you have to keep these two things into account when you are choosing your exposure settings. Image properties are characteristics and qualities of an image that are influenced by your camera settings. So now you know what these image properties are, what those actually look like. It makes a lot more sense when you actually see you know, examples of what these things are. We have three main types of image properties, depth of field, motion blur, and image noise, and they correlate to our three exposure settings that we can control. F stop controls depth of field, how much of your image is in focus. Shutter speed controls a motion blur or the streaking that occurs when your image is being exposed. And ISO controls image noise, which we generally want to keep as low as possible to keep our image quality as high as possible. And depth of field and motion blur can be used in creative ways. We've talked about, you know, isolating certain sections that you want to keep in focus with depth of field. And shutter speech can create all kinds of dramatic abstract images, which is a really cool thing to experiment with and play around with But, image noise is usually not something you want. You're pretty much always going to want to keep that ISO down and prevent image noise from being introduced into your photograph. Alright. So that's it for today, everyone. I will see you in the next lesson when we talk about the exposure triangle. So I will see you there. 8. The Exposure Triangle for Landscape Photographers: Hello, hello, everyone, and welcome to this lesson on the exposure triangle. This might be the most important topic in photography as a whole, certainly in landscape photography. You're definitely going to want to pay close attention to what you learn in this lesson because we're going to combine everything that you've learned throughout this course into this lesson. Let's take a look at what we're going to learn here. We're going to talk about how the three exposure settings that you've learned about throughout this course, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, how they work together in order to create well balanced, well exposed photographs. We'll talk about what the exposure triangle is exactly and why it is the key to getting off of auto mode. If you really want to master your camera and start taking better landscape photographs, the exposure triangle is really a core concept that you're going to need to understand at a fundamental level in order to do that. You're also going to learn how to use the exposure triangle to have creative control over your images. We talked about in the last lesson image properties. The exposure triangle is going to teach us not just about how to balance exposure in our images, but also to have more control with that balance when we are manipulating these image properties. I will make more sense as we look at several examples, a Walkie, several examples of how the exposure triangle comes into play when we are trying to have more creative control over our images. I'm going to teach you my simple four step workflow for balancing exposure in landscape photos. This is going to simplify the process of which settings to choose and why when you are out in the field shooting a landscape image. I really think this is going to help you out in terms of when you're on manual mode, it will help you figure out the exact aperture, the exact sutter speed, and the exact I you're going to want to pick depending on the scenario that you're in. And finally, as a bonus tip, I'm going to show you the best trick for creating sharp photos if you aren't using a tripod. This will come into play towards the end of this lesson when you are learning how to balance the exposure triangle. Very quickly, we've looked at this diagram many times throughout this course. We've talked about these four elements of exposure. We have the scene luminans, the F stop, the shutter speed, and the ISO. These are the four things that will affect the exposure of our images. We've also talked about how only three of these four settings that we can control. We control the F stop, we control the shutter speed, and we control the ISO. When we are controlling these three settings, The exposure triangle is a framework that allows us to in a way visualize how these three settings interact with each other so we can create the best possible exposures in our images. It'll tell us how and when to make these adjustments to get the right exposure. This will start to make more sense in a moment. But typically, when you see or hear or learn about the exposure triangle, it essentially is just a triangle where the shutter speed, F stop, and ISO are at each point in the triangle, just indicating that they all have a relationship with one another. There are three key concepts that you need to understand with regard to the exposure triangle. The first of these key concepts is that F stop, shutter speed, and ISO are interdependent. Now, what does that mean? That means really in simple terms that if you change one of these settings, it will affect the other settings. If you, for example, F stop, it's going to affect what you need to do with shutter speed and ISO. If you change shutter speed, That's going to affect what you need to do in order to adjust ISO and F stop. They don't each work in a vacuum. They're all interdependent. This is a diagram, more detailed diagram of the exposure triangle. What this is showing you here, we have F stop scale on this side. We have the shutter speed scale on this side. Remember we've learned all of these scales in the previous lessons, meter refresher, go back to each lesson on these topics. At the bottom here, we have ISO. As we go from a larger F stop to a smaller F stop, we are increasing the exposure of our images. As we go from a faster to a slower shutter speed. We are increase in the exposure in our images, and as we're going from a low to a high ISO, we are increasing the exposure in our images. This is a great way to visualize how all three of our exposure settings interact with each other in a way where if one changes, the other one is going to have to change. Once we start looking at examples of this, it's going to make a lot more sense. But the key concept here is that if you change one, it's going to affect the other. Because if we make, for example, F stop to bright, we're going to have to darken down our shutter speed in order to compensate for that. So just to visualize this. One way to think about this concept is just a simple balance. If we have a balance, and let's say, we have shutter speed and ISO on the left side, and then we have aperture on the right side. What these arrows are indicating is that we've got a narrow aperture, so our exposure is decreased. We have a fast shutter speed, so our exposure is also decreased, and our ISO is low. This means that if we have really fast shutter speed and a really low ISO and a really small aperture, our image is probably going to be too dark, especially if there isn't a lot of light coming in from the scene, scene luminosity. But we can balance this if we were to increase the width of our aperture. If we go from a smaller F stop to a bigger f stop, we allow more light in and then we can balance these other two factors even without changing them, these other two exposure settings without changing them. Now we've balanced these three settings. That's really just the simplest way to think about how the exposure triangle works. Really just imagine them balancing on a scale, and we're trying to figure out how to get the balance level. Let's talk about our second key concept with regard to the exposure triangle. This is that F stop, shutter speed, and ISO have proportional relationships. What this really means is that if you change one of the three settings, you can compensate by changing one of the other two. So let's take a look at what this really means. Let's take for example, we have a b a well exposed image. If you forgot what that really means, go back to the lesson on what exposure is, where we really talk about what a well balanced exposure is, but essentially it just means that it's an image that's not too bright and it's not too dark. Let's say here, let's ignore ISO for now, but we have our aperture and our sutter speed. They're set to a point where the image is not too bright and it's not too dark. Then Let's say we speed up our shutter speed by two exposure stops. Do you remember an exposure stop is just a doubling or the having of the amount of light that reaches the image sensor. We speed up the shutter speed by two stops, which essentially means that we are decreasing the exposure by two stops. What happens is that the image becomes too dark. But then what we can do in order to compensate for this is we can open up our aperture. We can go from a bigger to a smaller F stop by two exposure stops. Essentially, we can rebalance our exposure because we've compensated by the exact amount of exposure stops. We could also do this if we were using an example of ISO. If we speed up our shutter speed by two stops, we can also compensate by increasing our ISO and brightening our image by two stops. There are a lot of ways to do this if you think about juggling these three exposure settings, because if we increase one, we have to proportionally decrease the other if we want to keep the same exposure. This brings us to our third and final key concept when it comes to the exposure triangle, which is that FSTop, shutter speed, and ISO influence the image properties or creative aspects of a photo. Remember, image properties are what we talked about in the previous lesson, noise, motion blur, and depth of field. We can't just when we're thinking about the exposure triangle, we can't just think about exposure. We also have to take into account how the image properties are being affected when we're balancing our exposure. For example, When we are going from a ide to a narrow aperture, we are going to increase our depth of field. If you're shooting landscapes, even if, for example, you need a aperture at 1.4 in order to balance your exposure, this might not work because if you want to get a large depth of field, that particular F stop is not going to allow you to get enough depth of field to capture an entire grand landscape. You will have to adjust your other two settings in ways in which you can increase your F stop and get a larger depth of field. In landscape photography, because we're shooting landscapes, it makes it a little bit easier in terms of which settings you need to choose, because you have some constraints. Let's talk about what that means. Like I mentioned, when you're shooting a grand landscape, something that looks like this, you're going to need a bigger F stop number, you're going to need a more narrow aperture in order to capture this entire scene. You might need somewhere from F eight all the way to F 22 in order to capture this entire scene. For the most part, you want to stay around F eight or F 11, because when you start getting into F 16 and F 22, the image quality will start to degrade due to something called diffraction. Ideally, whenever you're shooting landscapes, particularly grand landscapes where you have a foreground, midground and background. You want to stay at F eight or F 11. This is really going to constrain you or at least make it a little bit easier in terms of choosing your other exposure settings. Because if we know pretty much every time we need to choose this first, we're going to know which ISO and which setter speed to choose next. So we start with aperture for that reason. We start with your F stop number when we are setting our exposure settings in the field. The next thing you want to look at when you are setting your exposure settings and manual mode is to set your ISO to the lowest native ISO on your camera. For most cameras, that's 100. When you're out in the field shooting, you set your camera to F eight or F 11, whatever gives you the best depth of field. Then you set your camera to the base ISO. The only reason you would want to change this as we'll talk about later is if something is moving in your image. But for now, let's assume nothing is moving. We're just going to set it to base of ISO because this is going to give you the best image quality. There's no reason to choose a much higher ISO and introduce noise for no reason. For the most part, we have our aperture already picked, we have our ISO already picked for most scenarios. These settings will work. Then we just essentially fill in the blank in order to balance the third side of the exposure triangle. You can allow your camera to do this. We'll talk about metering and metering modes and your camera uses a meter to essentially choose the best sutter speed to balance the image. But the shutter speed that you choose, as long as the image is properly exposed, the number doesn't matter unless the caveat is there's something moving in your scene. There's nothing moving in your scene, for example, in this scene, let's assume the flowers are really still, there's nothing moving. Then we can set our aperture to F eight, F 11, ISO 100, and then let the camera pick which one of these shetter speeds works best to balance the exposure. Remember, if something is moving, for example, like water, are going to have to pay attention to sutter speed because we're going to want to manipulate or control the motion blur in our photograph. This is my four step workflow. If I'm in manual mode, full manual mode, this is my workflow in order to simplify this process of choosing your exposure settings when you are in the field. The first thing, the first step is to ask, are there any moving objects in the scene? This includes you. If you're hand holding your camera, and your camera is going to be moving, and you are in this case, counted as the moving object. Even if what you're shooting isn't moving, if you're moving, it's still considered something moving in the scene. If nothing, if your intra is no, there's no moving objects. Then you can follow these next three steps. You set your F stop to maximize depth of feel. It's usually F eight or bigger. Then you set your ISO at base ISO. Then you set your shutter speed to balance the ISO and aperture. Remember, this is just like filling in the blanks because if that's constrained, ISOs constrained apertures constrained shutter speed, it's just going to have to be set in order to balance those other two settings. If your answer to the first question is yes, and there's a moving object in the scene. This can be clouds moving, water moving, tree swaying in the breeze, or if you're hand holding your camera and you're moving and introducing camera shape, if you're not on a tripod, then you follow these next three steps. Very similar, but notice the difference. Like in this second step, you set your F step to maximize depth of field. It's always what you prioritize as depth of field first. Then you set your shutter speed for your desired motion blur. You don't want any motion blare at all. You want to set your shutter speed to really fast shutter speed to freeze motion. Say you're shooting water, and you want that flowy running water look, you'll have to set it to longer shutter speed, maybe something like a half second or a second. Then once you set your shutter speed, then you set your ISO to balance your F stop in your sutter speed. Then this is when your ISO becomes the fill in the blank part. If we have our F stop set, our shutter speed set, we'll have to set ISO so that it keeps our image bright enough or dark enough to have a well exposed photograph. And I should note here that can actually simplify this workflow by using a semi automatic mode. You don't have to be on full manual mode. You can use something called aperture priority mode or shutter priority mode. We'll talk about what those are later in this course. Don't worry about those for now. Let's assume that you're learning how to use manual mode first, which I highly recommend you learn full manual mode first before you start jumping into these semi automatic modes. But something definitely to come back to. Let's look at some practical examples. We're going to put all of this together and we're going to walk through this workflow with some examples of photographs that I've taken over the years. Okay. In this first example, we don't have any moving objects. There's no clouds moving, there's no trees moving. The camera in this situation was on a tripod, so I wasn't moving. So the answer to our first question is no, there are no moving objects, which means that we move on to the second step. We set our F stop to maximize depth of field. In this example, my aperture F stop was set to F 11, and that allowed me to get the foreground all the way to the background sharp. I probably used F 11 because F eight might have caused some of the foreground or some of the background not to be sharp. We'll talk about ways you can check and make sure that you're getting a big enough F stop to get your entire scene in focus. We'll talk about that later in this course. Set the F stop. Then I set my camera to the base ISO. Remember, I'm just following these order of operations here, setting my camera to base ISO because there's no moving objects. Then I set my shutter speed. Shutter speed in this situation was 1 second, which is a long sutter speed because you can see this shot sunset, there is low light, but it doesn't matter because there's nothing moving in the scene, so there's no motion blur that's going to occur. There's no moving objects are going to be affected by a slower shtter. It could be 1 second, it could be 2 seconds. It really doesn't matter. Let's look at our second example. This is where we have moving objects, but my camera was on a tripod. I wasn't moving, but there were objects in the scene moving. In this case, the water was moving, not very much, you can see as a very mirror like reflection, but the clouds in the sky were moving, and I didn't want those clouds to be blurry. The answer to our first question is yes. There were moving objects. We have to move on to the right side of the flow chart, and I'll give you that flow chart to download. You can take that with you as a PDF version. Because we're moving to the right side of the flow chart this time, we again set our F stop to maximize depth of field. Again, F 11, you'll notice 99% of the time, I'll shoot at F 11 or F eight if I don't really have much foreground. Then I set the shutter speed to freeze motion. I knew based on the focal length of my lens and just being really familiar with my equipment, that one 50th of a second would be fast enough to freeze the movement of the clouds in the sky. And also any motion in the water here to create that mirror like reflection. Then because I already had my F stop set, I already had my shutter speed set, I really just let the camera figure out the best ISO, and that was 400. Much higher than my base ISO of 64 on my camera. 400 is still not especially in a professional quality full frame camera, it's not enough to really notice noise. It's not that big of a deal. I increased to 400 so that the image wouldn't be too dark. Otherwise, this image would have been much darker. Our third example, pretty similar. We have moving objects in the scene, and the camera was on a tripod. We have the clouds moving, we have the water moving, but I wasn't moving because my camera was on a tripod. We answer, yes, there were moving objects in the scene. Again, we're going to move to the right side of the flow chart you saw. The second step, like you've seen, already, we set our F stop to maximize depth the field. Again, F 11, and you can see how easy this becomes when you already know 90% of the time, your F sop is going to be F 11 F eight in a scene like this. In this particular scene, I wanted to add some motion blur. I wanted to smooth out the water here a bit. I wanted to have a longer shutter speed of about 1 second. When I'm in the field, sometimes I'll play around with half a second, 1 second, maybe 2 seconds just to see and I'll preview the image on image playback in order to see how much softness I want to the water, what I liked. That's an advantage of using image playback like you learned in the very first lesson. So I figured that 1 second I like the best, smooth enough to smooth out the water, but not so fast that or at least not so long that I lost some of the details in the water. The fourth step, again, just fill in the blank. Set the ISO to balance the other two exposure settings. That just turned out to be 100. It's pretty low ISO. Again, the camera by using your camera meter will help you figure out what that fill in the blank setting that I like to call it is. In this case, it was 100. All right. Our fourth and final example here. Again, we have moving objects. We're going to answer, yes. We do have moving objects. In this case, it's the clouds moving in the sky. But I was also hand holding the camera for this photograph. I did not have a tripod. Not only was there something moving in the scene, but I was also moving too. You have to keep that into consideration. In this example, I set my F stop to F eight because I didn't really have a foreground that was extremely close to me. This was shot with a telephoto lens, and this was pretty far in the distance. Because I didn't have a very close foreground like rocks or flowers, I could get away with a little wider aperture and a little shallower depth of field. Again, F eight, F 11, stick to those two F stops if you can. Those are also usually the sharpest apertures on your lens as well. We'll talk about that at another time. All right. Because I was hand holding, I knew that I needed a really fast shutter speed. I knew I needed fast enough where any motion due to me holding the camera, which is more significant than freezing the motion of the clouds. I had to freeze all of the motion caused by me holding the camera. So I knew that if I had a shutter speed over about 1200, and I'll show you in a moment how I knew that, something above one or faster than 1200, that I would be okay. In this case, I had much faster than that. I used 1/640 of a second, six 40th of a second. That is quite fast and sufficiently fast to freeze the motion, so this image was tack sharp. Then finally, I set my F stop to balance these two exposure settings. Again, filling in the blank. Again, the ISO here was higher than my base ISO, just because the image would have been too dark if I hadn't chosen a higher ISO. And again, the camera meter will help you do that. You will learn how to do all of that later in this course. Here's a bonus tip because we talked about here, how did I know that the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze motion? This is just a simple tip tip. When you're hand holding your camera, this this trick only works if you're using a full frame camera or if you have a crop factor, If you're using a cropped sensor camera. This will only work if you have the crop factor. But essentially how this works is it's just a simple formula. And this is the formula and what it means is that the shutter speed you choose has to be less than or equal to one over the focal length. Let's break this down into simple terms. In this image, I was shooting with a lens that was at a focal length of 100 millimeters. If you are unfamiliar with what focal length is, I have a full guide that I will link to this lesson that'll guide you through what focal length is. It essentially is a wide angle lens, has a small focal length, telephoto lens, has a large focal length. But if you're still following along with me, if you're shooting at a lens in this example, it was 100 millimeters, then all you do is put that number at the bottom of this formula. And that is the minimum shutter speed that you'll need to use if you are hand holding your camera. If I was shooting at a focal length of 200, then you would put 200 at the bottom of this formula. Then my minimum shutter speed would be 1/200, one 200th of a second. Then I would know that that's the fastest stter speed I need in order to freeze my scene to have no motion pl. That's how I knew in this scene, I was shooting with 100 millimeter focal link lens. I knew that I would have definitely a sharp image. Again, I checked on my image playback just to make sure, but I knew that anything over 1/1 hundredth of a second would be way fast enough to freeze motion. That is just a simple tip. Oftentimes it's called the reciprocal role, and just use it whenever you're hand holding. This will really help you when you are balancing your exposure settings when you're hand holding your camera. That was a lot. Let's review what you've learned in this lesson on the exposure triangle. You've learned that the exposure triangle describes the relationship between three key elements that control the exposure of an image. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO. This should be extremely familiar to you by now if you've made it to this point in the course. The three key aspects of the exposure triangle. The three key concepts that you learned about the exposure triangle are first interdependence. F stop shutter speed, and ISO are interdependent, which means that if you change one, it will affect the other two. These three exposure settings are also proportional. If you increase one by two stops, you can compensate by decreasing another one by two exposure stops or three exposure stops or however many exposure stops you need to compensate for the adjustment. Third, F stop shutter speed and ISO influence the artistic aspects of a photo. Remember the image properties, the depth of field, the motion blur, and the noise. You can't just think about balancing the brightness of your image. You have to take into consideration how your three exposure settings are going to affect your image properties as your balancing exposure. This is really the challenge of finding the balance between proper exposure and having an image that has the creative qualities that if you want your water to be blurred enough if you need enough depth of field. Finally, balancing exposure in landscape photography, the special considerations. Like I just mentioned, you need a large F stop if you want to have a large depth of field. When we're shooting these grand landscapes, you're going to want to use a bigger F stop f8f 11, like we talked about to get the entire depth of field. This is going to really create a restriction on what your other exposure settings are going to turn out to be. We want to have low ISO in order to have the best possible image quality. So we always start out in phase ISO, say 100 before we start increasing ISO as needed. And our shutter speed is going to be determined by whether or not we have a moving object in the scene. There's no moving object in the scene. Shutter speed doesn't matter. You can just select what your camera tells you to choose. But if you do have a moving object, you're going to have to consider whether you want a faster or a slower shutter speed, depending on the type of motion blur you want to introduce or not into your photograph. And our bonus tip, use a reciprocal role when you're hand holding your camera to prevent motion blur. Remember, it's just one over the focal length, and that's going to be the minimum shutter speed that you need to use in order to freeze a sine to create a really sharp scene with no motion blur. If you're hand holding your camera. That is it for this lesson on the exposure triangle. Later in this course, we are going to talk about more concepts relating to exposure such as your camera, your camera's meter, how to use your camera meter, how to use the histogram, and how to use exposure compensation. You can have even more control and even a deeper understanding of how to use these exposure settings and how to adjust them when you are in the field. I want to thank you for being here again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 9. Camera Modes: Hey, y'all, and welcome back to the class. Now that you've learned about the exposure triangle and how to choose the different exposure settings on your camera, shutter speed F stop and ISO. Now it's time to talk about something called camera modes. I briefly mentioned camera modes in the previous lesson because you're going to make your life a little bit easier, and your workflow a little bit more efficient when you're out in the field shooting and trying to figure out the best exposure settings for a specific scene. Let's take a look briefly at what you're going to learn in this lesson on camera modes. First, we're going to talk about what camera modes actually are and how you can use them to control exposure in your images. Then we'll talk about the different types of camera modes. There's five different types of camera modes, and which one of these you're not going to want to use. Then we'll discuss where you can find these camera modes on your camera so that you can change between them, so you can change from one camera mode to a different camera mode. We will talk about the best camera mode for landscape photography. This is the camera mode that I use 95% of the time in my landscape images. And finally, we'll come back to the four step workflow that I walked you guys through in the previous lesson and we'll walk through this workflow using this best camera mode for landscape photography. We'll go through some examples of how to do this in a similar way that we did in the previous lesson. But you're going to learn how to use this best camera mode that we'll discuss in these different scenarios. All right. First, let's talk about what camera modes are. And camera modes are really just different ways that you can tell your camera to choose the exposure settings. There are five different camera modes on your camera that you need to know about. The first one being automatic mode. And this is likely the one that you're already pretty familiar with. Automatic mode is just when your camera selects all of the exposure settings automatically. This is where most beginners start. This is say if you're using a camera phone or something like that, it's going to select all of the exposure settings without you having to do any work. And we've talked about how this can be a little bit of a problem, because you want to be able to control these three settings in order to first master your camera, but also to take better landscape photographs. The goal is to get off automatic mode, and that is why we're probably in this course is to learn how to get off auto mode. The second mode that you're hopefully familiar with by now is manual mode, and that's where you have complete control over your exposure settings. That's where you have the choice of what you want to set your ISO to, your shutter speed two, and your F stop two. We've been discussing this throughout this course. This is really the camera mode that you want to master first before you start experimenting with the next three camera modes that we'll talk about because you can master camera mode, then you'll be able to have complete control over your camera. You'll have complete control over your photography. The next few modes will just allow you to make this process a little bit easier, but you want to be a confident, self sufficient photographer understanding how to use manual mode first. So the next mode is program mode. This is also a mode that I don't recommend for landscape photography. This is a mode where the camera will automatically pick the aperture and the shutter speed, but you can change the other settings like ISO, white ballots, and exposure compensation. You don't have to worry about what exposure compensation is right now. We'll talk about that later. But for the most part, this is very similar to automatic mode, except you pick the ISO in a few other settings. Next, we have shutter priority mode, which can also be a useful camera mode in nature photography in general. This is where you pick the shutter speed. You have manual control over the shutter speed, but the camera will automatically select the F stop. P will also control the Ia. But for the most part, the important part of this mode is that it gives you control over the shutter speed and your life becomes a little bit easier because the camera will automatically select the aperture. And this is a great mode if you're shooting wildlife or say you're a sports photographer, because those are types of photographers that prioritize Shutter speed. They don't want motion blur in their images. They don't want their subjects to be blurry, so they want to set their shutter speed, have complete control so that it's fast enough to freeze motion. Because we're shooting landscapes, we don't have to worry about our subjects moving very much, or at least at all, we might have objects in our scene moving, which is different than our subject like an animal or a person moving in our scene that we want sharp. So the better option is this next mode, which is aperture priority mode. This is when you select the aperture, and the camera will automatically select the shutter speed. You will also control the ISO. But the important part here is that you have manual control over the aperture. As you'll see here in a moment, this is really the best this is the best camera mode for landscape photography because we want to control aperture and depth of field first. How do you change your camera mode on your camera? Well, it's very simple. If you have a mirrors or a DSLR camera, most likely, you're going to have a dial on the top of your camera that looks like this. And you'll see the symbol for auto, P, A, S, and M. And those are just your five different camera modes that you can switch between. All you have to do is rotate that dial, and it will allow you to quickly and easily change between your different camera modes. So auto right here, as the name suggests, is obviously automatic mode. Then P is for program mode, A is for aperture priority mode. S is for shutter priority mode, and is for manual mode. Pretty simple, right? Let's come back to aperture priority mode. Like I mentioned, this is the best camera mode for landscape photography, really other than manual mode. Manual mode is great for landscape photography too. So if you feel comfortable, always a manual mode, and you don't find that this aperture priority mode is helpful to you, then stick to manual mode. But if you want to make your workflow more efficient, if you want to make choosing settings just a little bit easier. If you want the camera to help you out while still having control manual controlled, then this aperture priority mode, which is also called a semi automatic mode. Is really fantastic. That's because like I said, we're shooting landscapes. We want to prioritize depth of field. We don't want the camera to choose our F stop because we don't want the camera determining the depth of field. It really can't determine how much depth of field we want. It's only metering to the amount of light. It's just trying to balance the exposure triangle, but it's not taking into account how much depth of field, we as the photographer want. We talked about already that we want to stay on our F stop scale in the range of F eight to F 11, so that we maximize depth of field. We can start pushing it to F 16 and F 22. But like I mentioned, your image quality will start to degrade due to diffraction. Don't worry about that too much right now, but f8f 11, just remember that these are the F stops that you want to stick to for most of your grand landscape images. All of these images were shot in F eight and F 11. We want to tell the camera Stay at F eight, stay at F or F 11, and don't change. We can allow it to change the other settings. We can let it choose the shutter speed. We can even actually let it choose the ISO, learn about auto ISO later. But we don't want to leave the F stop to chance because the worst thing that can happen is that we get home and our image is not in sharp focus because we used an F stop. Say we used F 5.6 or F four, and only a section of our photograph was sharp. We can't fix that in post processing. Let's come back to this workflow that we discussed in the previous lesson. This is my four step workflow for choosing my exposure settings in manual mode. I walked you through this in the previous lesson. I won't go over this again, but we're going to look at the difference between when you are shooting in manual mode, because this workflow works specifically in manual mode compared to aperture priority mode. You can see why aperture priority mode is a little bit easier to use if you haven't picked up on that already. So this is our original workflow. So you'll notice here is that whether you have moving object in the scene, you're always going to choose your F stop first. Again, that's why we want to use aperture priority mode. We always select the F stop first. Now, what changes is that we're going to allow the camera to choose the shutter speed automatically rather than choosing it ourselves. You'll notice that when we're in aperture priority mode, the workflow changes, and this is why it's easier. Regardless of if you have no moving objects or moving objects, The next three steps are going to be exactly the same. Can see before, we set our ISO, then we set our shutter speed to balance ISO. Here on the right side. If there's a moving object, you set your shutter speed for motion blur, and you set your ISO to balance F stop and sutter speed. There's more thinking involved, right? In this scenario, all we have to remember is we set our F stop, we set our ISO at base to reduce noise as much as possible. And then we let the camera choose the sutter speed. It's really that simple. Now, the only thing that changes is when you have a moving object in your scene. So like water, moving flowers, moving branches, something that you want to control for motion blur. So if there is something moving and we move to this side, remember, it's going to stay the same from node to yes, but we're going to add a fifth step if something is moving. That is, we're going to have to increase or decrease our ISO in order to change our sutter speed in order to speed up or slow down our sutter speed. L et's dive a little deeper into what this means. It's actually quite simple, and the more you play with this on your camera and practice with this, it's going to be extremely intuitive. You're not even going to have to think about it very much if you just keep practicing this. So if we go through these steps and we decide after the camera chooses the shutter speed. Say the camera is just going to meter the scene and pick a shutter speed that balances the exposure triangle. If you don't like that shutter speed, say if it does if it's not fast enough to freeze motion or if it's not slow enough to make desired motion blur like flowing water look more soft, then we're going to have to increase or decrease our ISO. One way I like to think about this is to think of ISO as the image shutter optimizer. This, as you've learned, Image Shutter optimizer isn't what ISO stands for, but it's a way to remember what ISO does when you're in aperture priority mode. Like we've discussed, let's come back to the exposure triangle. We have our F steps here, and we want to pick F eight or F 11. Then the next step is to choose your ISO. We choose ISO at base. Et's say we're metering a scene. Let's say we're taking a photograph and we're in aperture priority mode. And the camera decides that the best shutter speed is one eighth of a second to balance the exposure triangle. This is just an example scenario. Let's say that this shutter speed isn't fast enough. Say there's something moving in the scene like a tree branch and you want it to be frozen. You don't want any motion blur. We need to increase our shutter speed. Since we're in aperture priority mode, and the camera is choosing shutter speed for us, we're going to have to change the only setting that we have control over at this point. Other than aperture, because remember, we don't want to change this, so this leaves us with the only thing we can change is ISO. What we can do in order to change our shutter speed automatically is we can increase our ISO. Let's say, for example, we increase our ISO to 800. We increase it by three exposure stops. What the camera will do automatically is it will adjust the shutter speed. It will decrease the exposure by three stops by speeding up the sutter speed by three stops. We go from 18 of a second to one 60th of a second. Remember we're darkening down the image. By three exposure stops. This means that whenever we're shooting a scene and we want to speed up our shutter speed and we're in aperture priority mode. All we have to do is increase our ISO. This brings us to an important point. Increasing ISO automatically increases shutter speed. Let's say that we want to slow down our shutter speed when we're in aperture priority mode. We can just do the opposite. All we need to do is decrease our ISO. Let's say, for example, we decrease our exposure in the image by two exposure stops. The camera is going to have to compensate by two exposure stops. So we're going to slow down our shutter speed by two exposure stops. We're going to go from one 60th of a second to one 15th of a second. This brings us to our second important point, which is that decreasing ISO automatically decreases shutter speed. This is why it's great to think of ISO when you are in aperture priority mode as the image shutter optimizer. Because we're using the ISO to manipulate shutter speed in a way. Because F stop is fixed, we really can only control ISO given that the camera is choosing the shutter speed for us. We'll go through some real world examples of how this works so that it will really sink in. So we're going to go through the same images that we looked at in the previous lesson. Because before we were in manual mode, now we're in aperture priority mode, and you'll see the difference. In this first image, if you remember, there were no moving objects, and I had my camera on the tripod. There's nothing moving in this scene. The answer to the first question here is that there are no moving objects. We move on to the second step. Remember, the next two steps are going to be the same when you're a aperture priority mode, whether there's something moving or not. So we set our F stop to maximize depth of field. Here it was F 11. We set ISO to base on my camera that's 64. Then the camera automatically chooses the sutter speed. So in this case, the camera automatically chose 1 second stter speed. And that's fine because there's nothing moving. Again, it could have been five or 10 seconds. Because there's nothing moving, it really doesn't matter what the camera selects. So we're done with this image. This is all you need to do. You can see, especially when there's nothing moving, how easy aperture priority makes this process. For a second example, we did have moving objects. Remember, we have the clouds in the sky and the water is moving. We wanted to freeze the motion of the clouds and the water. We answer, yes, there are moving objects. Again, the next two steps are the same. Set F stop to maximize depth of field. Hopefully this is sinking in already because you've heard this so many times at this point. Set our ISO to base. The camera automatically chooses a shutter speed. In this case, it chose one half of a second. Now, I didn't think that was fast enough in this circumstance. I knew that intuitively because I've taken shots like this so many times, but also, I checked the image and image playback and the water and this look too blurry and the clouds were moving too much. So I knew I needed to increase my ISO in order to increase shetter speed. So what we do is we use our ISO, our image shutter optimizer to change our shutter speed. Because I increased my ISO to 400, my shutter speed is going to increase as well. Remember, we're compensating, we're reducing the exposure with shutter speed. We're speeding it up, reducing our exposure to compensate for brightening up our image with our ISO. The final shutter speed, after I manipulated ISO, I bumped it up. The final shutter speed was one 50th of a second, and that was fast enough to freeze motion. It's very simple. Increase ISO, the shutter speed increased, and I could have increased it even higher if I wanted to make my shutter speed even faster. Third example. Again, we did have moving objects. We had the water moving in this scene. The answer to that. First question is yes. We set our F stop to maximize depth of field. Here it was F 11 to get this entire scene sharp, set Iosot to base 64. Sound like a broken record at this point. The camera automatically chooses shutter speed. In this circumstance, the camera shows 2 seconds. There wasn't very much light in this scene. So It chose a longer shutter speed. I thought that was too long. It didn't create any detail in the water here. I wanted a little bit of detail. It was too smooth at 2 seconds. So I increased my shutter speed to 200 that sped up the shutter speed automatically, and the final sutter speed was one half of a second. And in this type of situation, you might want to play around. I started at 100 ISO that didn't get the sutter speed fast enough. I went to 200 ISO, took the picture, didn't like it, or I guess, in this case, I liked it. I probably tried 400, 800 ISO, just to see taking photos at those different ISOs, to see whether or not the shutter speed was fast enough or slow enough, just experimenting at this point. So I didn't get this right on the first time. I just wanted to throw that in there. A lot of the time it's trial and error to see which shtter speed works best based on what you wanted the water to look like. In our final and fourth example, we had moving objects and also the scene was shot hand holding the camera. A lot of motion blur to account for. We had to have a really fast shutter speed to get this sharp. The first question, yes, we had moving objects. Set the F stop to F 11 to maximize up the field. Set ISO to base, again, exact same steps. Camera automatically chose the shutter speed. And like we talked about in the last lesson, 1100 of a second was way too slow for hand holding at this focal length, so I needed to make it much faster. As I'm hand holding the camera, I'm constantly increasing ISO, taking the photo, checking the image, making sure it's sharp, and boosting that ISO essentially enough until the image is frozen. I increased ISO. It turned out that 400 was enough. To freeze motion in the scene, and the final shutter speed was 16, 40th of a second. And that is really all there is to it. Most of the time when you're shooting an aperture priority mode, you're just going to be increasing your ISO to freeze motion. That's most of the time that's going to be what's going on. Only time you would really take it down is if you feel like you went up too much, and you want to play around and experiment. And that's usually in a circumstance where you're shooting something like a waterfall or flowing water. You might need to increase or decrease ISO, just to play around and experiment with the sutter speed. That is it for our lesson on camera modes. Let's take a quick minute to review what you've learned in this important lesson. First, you learn about what camera modes are. Camera mode just control how the camera determines your exposure settings, your F stop, your shutter speed, and your ISO. There are five camera modes on your camera that you need to know about, auto manual, program, shutter priority, and aperture priority. Use the dial on the top of your camera to change between different modes. Aperture priority is the best mode for landscape photography. If you don't, for whatever reason, like aperture priority, use manual mode. You want to go on the side of having the most control over your exposure. Aperture priority gives you a little bit less control, but it makes your life a lot easier, and it lets the camera do some of the work. Use ISO when you're in aperture priority mode to decrease and increase shutter speed. Remember we talked about ISO. You can think of it as standing for image shutter optimizer. It's how we tweak shutter speed when we're in aperture priority mode. That is it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about metering, specifically how the camera meters light. This is where you're going to learn how the camera decides what exposure settings to choose. So if you are in, for example, auto mode or one of these semi automatic modes like aperture priority or shutter priority, how does the camera know which shutter speed to choose or which ISO to choose? If you're in auto mode? We're going to talk about how all of that works in the next lesson. I look forward to seeing you there and take care of guys. 10. Metering Modes: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this lesson on metering modes? Up until this point, you've learned all about the exposure settings on your camera and how to adjust them to create well balanced, well exposed images. But how do you know exactly which settings to choose and when? How do you know when you actually have a properly exposed image? And if you're using a automatic mode or a semi automatic mode on your camera, like aperture priority mode, how does the camera actually know which setting to choose? For example, if you're an aperture priority, how does it figure out which shutter speed to pick? Well, we're going to talk about the tool that you're going to be using to help you figure out how to get proper exposure in your images. And that is your cameras meter. Let's briefly talk about what you're going to learn in this lesson. We're going to cover a lot in this lesson. So you definitely want to pay close attention to what we discuss here. First, we're going to go into what light metering actually means in photography, and how we do that using your camera. You'll learn where to find your light meter on your camera. So you know exactly where it is when you want to go and use it. How to read your light meter, how to interpret what your light meter is telling you on your camera. We'll talk in depth about how the light meter works. And this is really important when we're talking about getting proper exposure in your images. There are three main types of metering modes that are going to be on your camera. We'll discuss what those three main metering modes are. And you'll learn the best metering mode for landscape photography. And the actual answer to this might not be what most photographers tell you is correct. Definitely stick around for that because you're going to want to have your camera on the right metering mode when you're out in the field shooting. We'll also discuss how to use your meter in tricky lighting situations. If you're in situations where the meter isn't always doing its job correctly because the meter can actually make mistake. So how do we fix those mistakes? And how do we overcome tricky lighting situations where the camera might not necessarily get it right when it's metering a scene. And finally, we'll talk about how to overrule the camera's meter when it doesn't get it right, when it doesn't choose the correct exposure settings to get correct exposure. We'll discuss that as well. First, let's go over briefly. Let's come back to our famous diagram here. We've seen this many times throughout this course. And we've discussed how when you are taking an image, when you're taking a photograph, what you are actually photographing is the reflected light from the scene. So the sun hits whatever you are photographing, for example, a tree in this simple illustration. And then the light is reflected off of your subject and back towards the camera. It's reflected in all different directions, but the only direction we care about is the direction that is directed towards the camera because this is the light that the camera is going to be capturing. You have something called a light meter inside of your camera. And what this light meter is doing is it's evaluating the light that is reflected from your scene, and it measures it and based off that measurement off of this scene luminance, this quantity of light, it's going to determine the exposure settings that you need in order to get a proper exposure. And we'll cover later in this lesson, what the camera thinks a proper exposure means, which is not always what the human thinks is a proper exposure, your camera, and what you think might be a little bit off, but it will guide you in the right direction. So your camera's light meter just measures or evaluates the reflected light that comes in through your camera, and it determines the combination of exposure settings that will work best for a proper exposure. Where is your light meter on your camera? You're going to need to know this in order to utilize your light meter when you're out in the field. Well, it can actually be in a few different places, can be in at least two, depending on the camera that you have. You might have a camera with a display on the top like this, and you'll find this graph. It looks like a scale. And it might even be numbered, like you see here. You have a plus one and a plus two and a minus one and a minus two. It'll look something like what you see here. You're also going to find it on the back of your camera on your LCD screen when you're in live view. We talked about how to get into live view in the very first lesson of this course. But when you are in live view, you can pull up the light meter. I might automatically show up or you might have to press a certain setting button on your camera to pull it up, that might be something like a display or an option button. But it will look something like this, this little scale here on the right side. It might also be on the bottom. So look for this scale. If you can't find it go into your camera's manual or Google, your specific camera, how to pull up the light meter, and you will find something that looks like this. You always want to have this pulled up in some way or visible in some way when you are photographing a scene. Now, how does this light meter actually work? How do you interpret and read what this graph is doing? Well, when you have a properly exposed photograph or what the meter thinks is a properly exposed photograph, the graph is going to indicate that by either having an arrow pointing at zero on the graph? Or it's going to just have no of these little hash marks. It's going to have none of these little hash marks, either on the right side or the left side. It's just going to look something like this. If your photograph is underexposed, or at least what the meter thinks is underexposed, where your image is too dark, you're going to have a meter that looks something like this. You see these little hash marks that are on the left side, that means it's moving towards the negative side of the graph. You can see there's a plus and a minus. So it just means it's moving down in exposure. In each one of these larger hash marks on the scale, so you see one here, you see one here and one here. Usually there's three visible. That just represents one exposure stop. So if these little hash marks go just to this first hash mark at the top, just means we've under exposed by one exposure stop. They go this part, it's two exposure stops. And if we go here, it's three exposure stops and it can go even more. The same thing for overexposed image. If it's too bright, if the camera meter thinks that it's too bright, then these little hash marks are going to move up on the right side, and they're just going to move up as far as it thinks you have over exposed the image in terms of exposure stuff. You can see here how these images correlate to what the meter might look like on your camera if you are photographing this scene. If you are in this particular situation photographing this scene and say you have an image that is under exposed or too dark, then all you need to do is adjust your exposure settings like we've talked about all throughout this course. You might need to slow down your shutter speed to let more light and hit your image sensor to brighten the image up, or you could increase your ISO by two stops in this example to brighten your image up, so it moves back to zero. You really, like we've talked about, we'd want to mess with your aperture very much because we want to make sure we get this entire scene sharp. We want to get enough depth of field. Maybe we could open up our aperture all the way to F eight if we were at F 11 to let a little bit more light in and brighten up the image. But if you're in manual mode, really, that's all you need to do is adjust those exposure settings to bring this scale, this graph back to zero, back to what it looks like in this image. Same thing or vice versa, if you are in a situation where you're over exposing your image, and your light meter is indicating that the image is too bright in this example two stops. So what we could do is speed up the shutter speed to darken down the image, we could speed it up by two stops, or we could reduce our ISO. If we were at a higher ISO, we could bring the ISO down, or we could go to a bigger F stop. So something like F 11 F 16, potentially, if we want to keep the other exposure settings the same, so we could darken this image back down. This is what this looks like on my camera. I'm in manual mode, and all I'm doing is increasing and decreasing the shutter speed. You can see how the meter is telling me that my image is too bright or too dark, depending on how fast or how slow my shutter speed. I slow my shutter speed down, it gets too bright. I speed my shutter speed up too much. It gets too dark. In order to properly expose your images, you need to understand how your camera meter works, because when you understand how it works, you can make corrections when it's not doing its job properly. So let's talk about how your camera meter works inside of your camera. Now, the camera meter assumes that the average scene is about the brightness of something called middle gray. And middle gray is a tone that is literally directly between pure black and pure white. Your camera meter wants everything to be middle gray in order to have what it thinks is perfect or proper exposure. Middle gray, sometimes it's called neutral gray or 18% gray because it's the shade that reflects 18% of a light that hits it. So when a camera is metering a scene, it really thinks that a proper exposure is if the reflected light is about 18%. Unlike you and me, the camera meter can't see in color. It only sees things in terms of tonality. In other words, it can only see things on a gray scale from black to white. So what it does is it takes the image, and it converts it into gray tones. In other words, another way of thinking about this is it converts it into a black and white image. So you have really bright tones. If you're shooting a scene like this, something The tones in the sky are going to be really bright. And then you have dark tones, maybe tones that are close to pure black and the shadows, and then the mid tones, and everything in between on a scale of black to white. Then what your meter does is it tries to average out the brightest tones like the tones in the sky and the darkest tones, like the tones in the shadows so that it all averages out to middle gray. So in other words, it averages all the tones together, and the overall brightness that it wants your image to have is middle gray. So what we saw in this scale right here. The camera is then going to suggest the best settings to achieve this middle gray exposure. If you're using, for example, automatic mode, it's going to suggest an ISO, an F stop, and a shutter speed that balance out to an exposure that is middle gray. When you're in manual mode, it's going to use your camera meter to suggest if it thinks that your camera settings need to change because it's too bright, or if your camera settings need to change because it's too dark. It's not actually going to change them for you. The problem here, the problem happens in the real world, right? We're actually shooting landscapes. They don't always look best when they are exposed for middle gray. And we'll talk about this later, especially certain situations where exposing for middle grade does not work. And you're really going to want to know how to fix these problems that occur when the camera meter exposes for middle gray, but it actually doesn't look good to the eye. So, like I mentioned, this in a perfect world, this is what the camera meter would want the exposure to look like, and that's when it will show you that it is at zero on the camera meter graph. There are three metering modes that you need to know about. There's three main metering modes, and your camera actually might have more than three, but all of them really boil down to these main three modes. And the first one is called matrix. That's matrix metering mode. And it also goes by the name of multi and evaluative. Matrix is the term that Nikon uses. Multi is what Sony uses and evaluative is what Cannon uses. And if you have another brand other than these three main brands, it might even call it something different. But these different names don't actually matter because they're all doing the same thing. We'll talk about what that is in a minute here. The second mode you need to know about is center weighted. It's a second main mode. And the third mode is spot metering mode. Let's talk about matrix Multi and evaluative first. It's kind of a hard word to say. Evaluative many times. What this mode does. In all the different cameras, it all does the same thing, even though it's called different names, and it might even have a slightly different symbol. This is what it looks like on a Nicon. It looks very similar in pretty much all the different camera brands. But just so you know it might not look identical to what this icon looks like here. But what it's doing is it's just evaluating the entire scene, is taking into account all of the tones across the entire frame and averaging them out, like we talked about to expose for middle gray. And this can be a problem because if you have a scene that is mostly dark or mostly bright, I can confuse your camera meter if it's trying to take into account the entire scene, as we'll talk about here in a little bit. The second mode, center weighted evaluates the middle of the frame. So it weights the middle tones more than it does the surrounding tones, and it really ignores the tones at the margins of the frame at the corners. So it places the emphasis on the middle of the frame here. So if you have a scene that's mostly say mid tones, then this mode does a pretty good job. You can keep your camera on center weighted, and it will work for many circumstances. In a high contrast scene like this, it might cause problems, especially if the center of your frame is the shadows, but it often does a pretty good job, especially if you're shooting more intimate landscape scenes. And the third metering mode is called spot metering mode. And that is where the camera meter will evaluate light around the point that you focus on. If this little circle here is the point that you focus on in the scene, then the camera is going to meter the scene based on that exact point. This type of metering does not work well for landscape photography. It works better when you are doing things like sports photography or wildlife photography, when you want to meter for the most important subject in the frames, say you have an animal that maybe the animal is really dark and their surroundings is really bright. You don't want to expose for the bright part, so you want to expose for the darker animal because Presumably, you want the animal to have the most well balanced exposure. Even if the other parts of the image don't come out well, you want that specific point in your image to have enough shadow detail, highlight detail to make it look good in your final image. So what mode is best for landscape photography. And this can be really as simple as using matrix mode or multi or evaluative. Most of the time, this will do a pretty good job, especially if you just want to keep your camera in one metering mode, set it and forget it, not worry about it. If you want to use center weighted metering mode, that works well for many landscape images. But if you don't want to deal with switching it around, then just keep it on matrix mode or whatever mode that will evaluate the entire scene for you. With that being said, The truth is that the metering mode you choose for landscape photography actually doesn't matter that much. And the reason for that is because you can override what the camera is telling you to do. What it thinks is the best exposure. We'll talk about that later, how you can override your camera settings and what it suggests. But just think of your me, your camera meter, and the settings that it suggests is just recommendations. You don't actually have to follow these recommendations if you don't think that they are accurate, or they don't work well for your creative intention. So set it to matrix mode, but don't worry too much about the mode that you choose because it's just a recommendation. It's just advice from your camera, and you can change your exposure settings to what works best for the situation that you are in. It's just a tool that will help you out. Let's talk about metering in tricky lighting situations. This is an important part of this lesson that you're really going to want to pay attention to. Because the meter doesn't always get it right. And that's why when I said the metering mode doesn't really matter is because you as a photographer need to know how to control your camera in such a way that even if the camera meter doesn't get it right, you know exactly what to do, how to overcome these tricky lighting situations. And so I can't really rely on the meter that much. And the situations where metering becomes difficult and where it causes problems in a way, is situations like this when we have mostly bright scenes. So specifically when we're shooting snow is really a major one in landscape photography. When we have mostly dark scenes like this where most of the scene is in the shadows and when we have high contrast scenes. And I mentioned here that when I say a high key or a low key scene, a high key scene just means that most of the tones in the image are bright, and a low key scene means that most of the tones in the image are dark. So if we were to convert these two scenes into black and white, we'd see mostly bright lighter tones. And in this case, in a low key scene, we'd see mostly darker dark gray or black tones. The first tricky lighting situation that you're going to want to know about is when you're shooting mostly bright high key scenes. And a lot of the times photographers, landscape photographers get into trouble when they're shooting snowy scenes, scenes like this. So this is what I like to call the snow problem. So what happens here is when the camera meters the scene, it thinks that the scene is over exposed because it's mostly lighter tones. So the camera meter, even though this image looks properly exposed to the eye, The camera meter is going to show indicated here that the image is over exposed, go to want you to darken the image. It's going to want to expose for middle gray and darken it down so that it looks like this. And the camera might tell you, indicating right here that the camera meters zero, that it thinks that this is a properly exposed image. But we know just by looking at this photo that it's too dark because snow doesn't look gray, right? Snow is going to look white. When you're shooting snow, the camera meter is always going to want to make your image look more gray. It's going to want to make the snow look gray. Because it's exposing for middle gray, as we've learned so far. What you'll need to do is you'll need to change your exposure settings to brighten the image back up, or at least you'll have to just ignore what the camera is telling you to do. So in this case, the exposure stops, we have plus two exposure stops here. That is actually a proper exposure in this example. So we are exposing for a brighter exposure on this gray scale. And now the image looks more natural to the eye. And you could do this by slowing down your shutter speed or increasing your ISO, doing things like that in order to brighten the image, ignoring your camera's camera meter. In this second scenario, when you have a mostly dark scene, and I call this the shadow problem, the same thing is going to happen but in reverse. So the camera is going to think that this image is too dark. Even though we know this image is well exposed because the sky looks bright enough in the shadows. We still have detail in the shadows. They're not underexposed. We can still see the detail, but we still want the shadows to be dark enough, right? Because we know when we're shooting the scene that this was a dark scene. So it needs to look dark in order to look natural. But the camera thinks that this is under exposed by two stops. What the camera is going to do, if it were an auto mode, it would automatically brighten this image up to look like this. For a manual mode is going to want us to change our exposure settings for the image to look like this. It wants to expose to middle gray. However, we're going to have to change our camera settings to darken it back down. We want a properly exposed image. So we're going to have to either speed up our shutter speed or keep our ISO low or go to a higher F stop to reduce the amount of light entering the camera. So this is another situation where you want to ignore the camera's meter and darken down the image and not worry about what it's saying. In our third scenario, this is when we have high contrast scenes. High contrast scene is when you have really, really bright tones and really, really dark tones in the same scene. And that often happens if when you're shooting at sunrise and sunset, and you have lots of shadows, but you also have really bright parts in the sky. Now, the camera, say you're in matrix mode or center weighted mode, it might want to either expose for the sky, or it might expose for the shadows, depending on what exactly you're pointing your camera at and what mode what metering mode you're in. So in this example, the camera thinks that this image is over exposed. And in this example, the camera thinks that this image is underexposed, even though this is a proper exposure. The camera is going to want to therefore, in these two examples, either darken down the image to bring it back to zero or brighten up the image to bring it back to zero. As you can see, these two image, these two images look absolutely terrible. These shadows are too bright here, and the sun is completely blown out, and here the shadows are too dark, and the sky just looks really weird and too dark. In these three scenarios that I just showed you, there are a few ways that you can override your settings, and we've already talked about the first one, which is that? When you're in manual mode, so full manual mode you've been learning about so far, all you have to do is just change the F stop shutter speed and ISO, and that's just going to automatically override what the camera says. Because you're not in automatic mode, the camera isn't going to choose these settings based on what it meters to be a proper exposure. You get to choose the settings, like, you've learned. So all you have to do is just change those settings and just ignore what the camera meter is telling you if it's telling you is too dark, then you don't even have to worry about that. You just know that there are reasons why the camera is telling you it's too dark. The second way is by something called exposure compensation. So if you are in a semi automatic mode, like you learned about in the previous lesson, you learned about aperture priority, shutter priority mode, even automatic mode, you can override what the camera says by using something called exposure compensation to darken or brighten the image. For example, if you are in aperture priority, you know, as you've learned that the camera is going to choose the shutter speed for you. So what you can do is you can use aperture priority to override the shutter speed that the camera is automatically chosen. Now, we're going to talk all about exposure compensation in the next lesson. This is just a preview of what's to come, but it's something to understand. Before we move on is that when you're in a semi automatic mode, you're going to override what the camera meter tells you using exposure compensation. So that is it for this lesson, and we covered a lot in this lesson. So let's go over the most important points that you need to take away from this lesson that you have just watched. First, the meter in your camera. What it does is it measures the reflected light coming from the scene to determine the best exposure settings, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, or a well balanced, properly exposed photograph. Your light meter is indicated on your camera by graph or scale, like we've seen, just that simple scale, and you'll find it on the LCD screen when you're in live view, and you also might find it on the top of your camera. The meter exposes for middle gray, so called neutral gray or 18% gray. And that gray is just the midpoint between pure black and pure white. There are three main metering modes on your camera. Camera might have more than these, but these are the three main ones that pretty much all cameras are going to have. There's matrix, also called multi or evaluative. They're center weighted, and there's spot metering. You're going to want to use matrix metering mode for landscape photography. You can get away with center weighted metering as well. But like we talked about, it actually doesn't matter because the meter is just giving you a ballpark. And then you can override what the camera is telling you because you want to have control over the ultimate final image that you produce. You don't want to just let the camera decide what it wants to do in terms of proper exposure. The meter can get it wrong. We talked about the situations when the meter can not suggest proper exposure, like when you're shooting mostly snowy scenes or scenes that are mostly dark, low key scenes, or in high contrast scenes where you have really, really bright tones and really dark tones. And finally, you can overrule your camera's meter when you're in manual mode. You can change the three exposure settings as you please. But if you're in a semi automatic mode like aperture priority, then you can use exposure compensation. And we're going to talk about what exposure compensation is and how to use it in the next lesson. So definitely stick around, and I will see you there for the next lesson on exposure compensation. 11. Exposure Compensation: Hey, y'all. In the previous lesson, we briefly touched on something called exposure compensation. This is going to be the topic of today's lesson. If you are shooting in automatic mode or one of the semi automatic modes like aperture priority mode that we discussed in the previous lesson on metering modes, then you are definitely going to want to learn how to use exposure compensation. Let's take a look at what you're going to learn in today's lesson. First, you're going to learn what exposure compensation is. Then you're going to learn where to find it on your camera, if you have a DSLR or a miles camera, you'll learn the circumstances when you should be using exposure compensation. So you don't always need to be using this. You'll also learn how to use exposure compensation and also how this feature works. Let's first talk about what exposure compensation actually is. Like you learned about in the last lesson on metering. The camera meter doesn't always choose the best combination of exposure settings, the F stop shutter speed and ISO for a proper exposure. This usually happens in tricky lighting situations. For example, when you're shooting high key scenes such as a mostly snowy scene, the camera will want to darken the image down because it thinks that this is a properly exposed image. If you're shooting low key scenes that are mostly dark, if you have mostly shadow, the camera is going to want to brighten the image up too much. Even though it thinks this is a proper exposure, we know that this doesn't look natural to the eye. The third scenario is when you're shooting high contrast scenes. The camera meter might overexpose or under expose the image based on what actually looks natural. What exposure compensation does is it allows us to override our exposure settings so that you can get a proper exposure. And this is something that's going to come really in handy when you're shooting in these tricky lighting situations. Where do you find exposure compensation on your camera? Well, there are two main ways that you can usually adjust and find exposure compensation on your camera. Sometimes you'll have something that looks like this, which is a dial at the top of your camera. This, by the way, is for most DSLR and mirrorless cameras. You'll either have something that looks like this, a dial, that you can turn to the left and to the right. If you turn it one direction, it'll go to the positive numbers, and if you turn it to the other direction, it'll go to the negative numbers. The other option, and this is what's on both my mirrors and DSLR camera. My Nicon is this exposure compensation button. It'll look like a plus and a minus, and all you do is press down that button and then move one of the dials, either the thumb dial or the dial for your forefinger. It just depends on how your particular camera works. On my Nicon z72. All you do is press down this button and then use the thumb dial to either increase or decrease exposure compensation. What should you use exposure compensation? And this is something that sometimes confuses photographers because you can't use exposure compensation when you're in manual mode. Because when you're in manual mode, you have full control over your shutter speed F stop, and ISO, right? So when you switch to a different mode like auto mode or a semi automatic mode like shutter priority mode or aperture priority mode, That is when you want to use exposure compensation to brighten and darken your image? Those are the specific situations? When you want to brighten or darken an image such as these images that we've looked at already several times at this point. If we needed to change the exposure on these images, and we are in an automatic or semi automatic mode, we would use our dial, our exposure compensation dial to brighten or darken the images as we deem as the photographer an appropriate exposure. How do you actually use exposure compensation on your camera? Let's say, for example, you have an image like you've seen before, that's too dark. This snowy scene, say you're metering the scene and you're in aperture priority mode. The camera is showing you that this is a proper exposure, but you know that it's too dark. All you have to do is turn your dial to a positive number and increase the brightness in your image before you take the photograph. In this case, we just increased by two exposure stops, and now we have a properly exposed image. That's all there is to it. It's quite a simple process. The same thing, if you have an image that's too bright. Let's say we have this image and the meter says, this is well exposed, but we know that it's not or an aperture priority. All we have to do is turn our exposure compensation dial to the left, darken down the image so that it looks natural to our eyes and we can see that we have a properly exposed photo. You'll notice that the meter will show you how much you've compensated in your exposure. Let's go over how exposure compensation works. So what exactly is the camera doing when it brightens and darkens down the image when you're turning your exposure compensation dial? Well, again, it's actually quite simple. So let's say you're an aperture priority mode, and this is the mode that you're going to want to be in, like I mentioned. So this is really the most important one to pay attention to. So let's say you're an aperture priority mode. You're metering a scene and you're about to take a photograph. And you've set your aperture to F eight, you've set your ISO to 100, and the camera decides that automatically that your shutter speed should be one quarter of a second. This is just an example scenario. Let's say that you want to decrease the exposure in your image. What the camera is going to do when you dial down your exposure compensation, is it going to speed up your shutter. It's going to change the shutter speed. So if we were to dial down our exposure compensation by two exposure stops, Then the shutter speed would automatically have to speed up by two exposure stops, which means that the shutter speed would automatically change to one 15th of a second. The camera is just doing this automatically for you because the F stop is fixed and the ISO is fixed. It's just filling in the blank based on what we're telling it with our exposure compensation. If we're in shutter priority mode, which you might use if you're a wildlife photographer, if you do any type of action photography, then what's going to happen is that the F stop is going to change. So your shutter speed will stay fixed, your ISO will stay fixed, but your F stop will automatically change. So let's say in this scenario, we've metered a scene, we have set our shutter speed to one fourth of a second. O ISO is at 100, and the camera automatically will choose F eight. Let's say in this particular example. If we dial our exposure compensation up by two stops, notice what happens to the F stop. The F stop is going to go to F four. What it's doing is it's just compensating by the exact number of exposure stops, increasing the exposure in our image by moving to a wider, or bigger aperture. That's really it for exposure compensation. It's actually quite simple. Once you start using this, it'll start to become very intuitive, especially if you pretty much always stick to aperture priority mode, which I definitely suggest that you do. Then you'll get used to increasing, decreasing your exposure, your brightness in your image by dialing up and dialing down your exposure compensation. Let's take a look at the main things that you've learned in this lesson. Exposure compensation lets you brighten or darken an image when you need to override your camera's automatic exposure settings. When you need to ignore the either F stop or the shutter speed. You can control exposure compensation with a dial or a dial button combination on the top of your camera. So just look for that either on the top of your camera, and if you have any trouble finding that, just take a look at your camera manual or Google your cameras make in model and exposure compensation, or send me a message and I can help you out. Exposure compensation doesn't work in manual mode. This is something important to remember. We control our settings manually in manual mode. But when you're in automatic or semi automatic mode, and the camera is guessing certain exposure settings depending on the mode that you're in, then you're going to want to use exposure compensation. If an image is too dark, you dial your exposure compensation to a positive number. If the image is too bright, you dial it to a negative number. It's really just that simple. You dial it to positive to brighten, dial it to negative, to darken. And finally, exposure compensation works by adjusting one or more of the exposure settings. And this depends on the camera mode that you are using. So if you are an aperture priority mode, when you change your exposure compensation, when you dial it up and dial it down, you're essentially just changing the shutter speed, and the camera is going to automatically pick the best sutter speed based on how much you've increased or how much you've decreased your exposure compensation. That's it for our lesson on exposure compensation. What I would recommend you do at this point is put your camera in one of the semi automatic modes, like aperture priority mode. And then just play around, find exposure compensation on your camera and do some experiments, increasing and decreasing exposure compensation, taking different images, seeing how this setting affects exposure in different scenarios and circumstances. I hope that helps you out. Thanks again, guys. I'll see you soon. 12. Image Histograms: Welcome back again, everyone. By the way, great job making it this far in this course, because we have covered so much so far up to this point. Hopefully a lot of this is starting to sink in. Hopefully you're getting a really good handle on how exposure works and how to use your camera settings to create proper exposure in your images. Now it's time to talk about something that is really important, which is the image histogram. This might be the most important tool that you can use to essentially guarantee that you get correct exposure in every photograph that you take. The image histogram is something that you're going to want to use every time you shoot a photo. Let's talk about what you're going to learn in this lesson on histogram. First, we're just going to talk about what a histogram is. So you understand what that term even means. We'll discuss why histograms are the best tool for nailing exposure in your images. You'll learn why you really need to be using this every time you take a photograph. You'll learn where to find them on your camera, how to pull them up. You'll learn how to read and evaluate an image histogram. This is really important, something that you're definitely going to want to stay to learn about. We'll also talk about how to use them to avoid overps and under exposing your images. This is a tool that will help you keep the level of brightness in your images at a correct level. First, let's talk about what a histogram is. And let's talk about it in the context outside of photography, because histograms can be used not just in photography, but in all types of circumstances where we're trying to describe a set of data or information. And really, what a histogram is in the most simple terms is it's a bar graph that's used to visually describe information. L et's break down what this means. One of the most simple examples that I like to use, partly because who doesn't love puppies, but I like to use the puppy example to demonstrate how to use a histogram in the most simple way. So Let's say that our data is based of three different colored puppies. Let's say that we have three gray puppies, eight brown puppies and five yellow puppies. What we can do is we can use a histogram to create a chart that will visually show us what this information looks like. We're basically just going to graph out this information. If you're not a math person, don't worry, you don't have to be good at math, to understand how histograms work. So we have these 16 different colored puppies. Let's look at how we would grab that using a histogram. So the histogram would look something like this. You'll see that we have a bar that represents each different colored puppy. So we have a gray bar, a brown bar, and a yellow bar. And what these bars are showing us is how many puppies are in each category. So on the x axis here, we have the three categories of puppy color. Then on the y axis, on the vertical axis, we have numbers that are just showing us how many puppies are in each one of these categories. Each bar is going to go as high as the number of puppies that are in that category. You can see we have three gray puppies because the gray bar goes up to the number three. We have eight brown puppies because this bar goes to eight, and we have five yellow puppies because this goes to the number five. That's really all there is to it when we're talking about histograms. This is what a histogram is in the most simple terms. How do we use histograms in digital photography? We can apply this concept to help us visualize all of the different tones that we have in a photograph. We'll talk about what this means throughout the rest of this lesson. Histograms, what they're used for in photography, in digital photography specifically, because in film, we don't work with pixels, digital screens, and pixels. But in digital photography, an image histogram shows us the frequency distribution of pixel tones in a photograph. Now let's break down what this means. Let's say in a very simplified example, let's say that this is a black and white photograph. As you probably know, every photograph can be broken down into pixels, just these little individual dots that make up the entire photograph. Well, in a typical image, you'll have millions of these pixels. But in this simplified example to help us see how a histogram works. We're just going to look at a essentially fake image that has 63 pixels. Now, in this particular image, obviously, this isn't an image of anything. We have all of these different gray tones. We have tones that range from pure black to pure white, and then we have different shades of gray in between. We also have nine pixels is the width, and seven pixels is the height. You can see nine times seven is 63. How would we show this information on a histogram, like we did in the puppy example? Well, the histogram would look something like this. What we would do is we would plot each shade of gray or black or white on this bar chart to indicate how many pixels are in each category. In each of these categories, by the way, sometimes you'll hear them called bins, B I N S. Each bin is just a separate category. In this example, you can see by this bar graph by this histogram that we have eight black pixels. You could count them out if you wanted to, but I made it easy for you. We have eight black pixels, 19 dark gray pixels like this. We have 16 50% gray or middle gray that look like this. We have 13 light gray like this one, and we have seven white pixels. We have on the bottom, you can see the distribution of the different categories. We have five different categories or bins that indicate the different shades of gray. On the left side on this y axis, we have the number of pixels that are in each category. Again, very simple, and we're going to apply this concept to an image that is much larger. Like I mentioned, most cameras produced images that have millions and millions of pixels in them. This image right here has about 35 million or so pixels. You can't see each individual pixel because there's so many of them that you can't see them to the naked eye. You were in photoshop and you zoomed all the way in as far as you could go. You could start seeing all the individual pixels. But when you're zoomed out, all you see is this beautiful photograph. In this photograph here, this was taken using my Nikon z72. This is a 45.7 megapixel sensor that this camera has. And what that means, what the megapixels mean? If you have a camera that has say 12 megapixels, or 30 megapixels, whatever your camera has, what that means is that the sensor has this number of pixels times 1 million. This sensor on this camera has 45.7 million megapixels. That doesn't quite equate to the number of the number of pixels that's produced in the final image. But you can see that this image here, like I said, it's something around 35 million pixels that make up this entire image. The final image is a little bit less than what the pixels on the sensor are. But this image is 7,208 pixels wide. And it's 4,804 pixels tall. If we multiply these two numbers, we can get the total number of pixels in this image. If you want to know the exact number of pixels in an image, if you just open it up in photoshop, you will see that number at the bottom when you have the image open in a window. Obviously, in this situation, the histogram is going to be graphing a lot more pixels than what we just saw in this example. So this is what the histogram would look like for this image. This is a typical histogram that you might see on your camera or maybe in photoshop. You can look at the histogram as well. The histogram is showing you the distribution of all of the different tones in this image. The histogram isn't showing color, at least this histogram isn't. Essentially looking at this photo in terms of tonal values. If you were to convert this image to black and white, it's mapping the brightness of the tones on a scale from black to white. If this doesn't make sense at this point, that's okay. We're going to dive deeper into what this histogram graph is showing right here. But just so you know, when we're talking about creating histograms off of the images that come out of our camera, we're talking in terms of millions of pixels that are going to be mapped on our histogram. How do we use histograms as photographers? What's the point of creating these bar graphs mapping all of our pixels? Well, histograms are used to help us determine if our images are too bright or too dark. They help us dial in proper exposure for our images. This is a photograph of the back of my camera showing what the histogram looks like, when I'm in live view. You want to pull up your histogram when you are in live view so that you can either see it on the back of your LCD screen, or if you have an electronic viewfinder, you can look through the viewfinder and see the histogram. If you open live view on your camera and you do not see the histogram, you might just have to pull it up using either a display button on my camera in particular, you just press this display button and the histogram will pop up. You might have to use an options button or go into your camera settings. Google how to find the histogram on your camera's make and model, and that should point you in the right direction. Again, like always, if you have any trouble figuring this out on your camera, just send me a message. I'd be happy to help you out with that. We want to have our histogram pulled up when we are in live view so that we can make adjustments to our exposure in real time. As we are creating our composition, as we are about to take the photograph, we want to look at our histogram and determine whether we need to brighten or darken the image. That's essentially what this tool is used for. We can use it as a guide or a reference to make sure that we are not making our photograph over exposed or under exposed. The other time that you'll want to check your histogram is after you shoot a photograph. What you'll want to do is review each image that you take in image playback, which we talked about in the very first lesson. We talked about image playback and how to look at the exposures that you just took. When you're an image playback, you can pull up the histogram. Again, this is something that you'll want to check your camera manual to figure out how to pull this up. It's usually very simple. For example, on my camera, you just press down on the toggle button, and these different histograms will pop up and we're not going to worry about what the red green and blue histogram mean at this point. This is the histogram that you want to pay attention to. This histogram will show you if you accidentally bumped up your exposure too much and made it too bright or made it too dark. This is really just insurance to double check to make sure that when you were looking at the histogram in live view and you thought the exposure was correct, you can check it again in image playback, as you see here, to make sure that what you saw was actually correct. Let's now talk about how to read an image histogram. This is really the crux of this lesson. This is a really, really important skill that you must understand if you want to master exposure. So like we talked about, a histogram is just a graph that shows the distribution of pixel tones in our image. So we have millions of pixels in our image, and they're all map out on this histogram from pure black to pure white. Then we have all of the shades of gray in between. What this graph is showing us is how many pixels are in each major tonal range in an image. For example, This histogram is showing us that there are not very many tones in the brightest parts of an image. Well, look at what image correlates to this histogram in just a moment. We're also seeing that there are not very many highlights in this image. There are more highlights and there are brighter toes, more white tones. Then we can see that there are lots of mid tones in this image. Then we can see that there are a significant amount of shadows, definitely more shadows than highlights. Then we can see that there are not a lot of blacks in this image. We can see just a little bit of this tail here indicates there aren't very many blacks. Really all there is to it. We're just pling at a distribution of all of the pixel tones in a photograph from the darkest tones, all the way to pure black, all the way to the brightest tones towards pure white. You can see here that if you were to really zoom in on a histogram on your camera, you would see that there are individual bars. In this entire histogram for an eight bit image, which you're most likely using, in an eight bit image, there are 256 of these bars in this bar graph or bins, as they're also called. If one of these bars is at zero, we can have potentially bars that go all the way to 255, and that's a total of 256. Since each one of these bars is one tonal value, we could potentially have 256 different tones in a photograph. Let's look at the image that correlates with the histogram that we've been looking at. This histogram represents what you're seeing in this photograph right here in terms of the distribution of the different tones in this image. If I were out in the field, taking this photograph with live view open up on my camera, then the histogram would look something like this. What you can see in this image is that we have shadows in this area and this area, also down in here. We also have highlights in the brightest parts of the sky. These are the rightightest tones, and these are the darker tones, and then we have the mid tones. The way you can see from the histogram is that the majority of tones in this photograph are in the mid tones range. You can see we have smaller amount of highlights indicated by the reduced amount of pixels and highlights in whites region. And we also have a reduced amount of shadows. We have relatively fewer shadows, at least in comparison to all of the mid tones that we have in this photograph. Let's talk about how we actually evaluate exposure using histograms. There are really five main types of histograms that you need to be aware of, especially when you're starting to work with this tool so that you have a general understanding of what the shape of the histogram is telling you. When you're looking at your histogram on Live view, you can tell what is the shape of this histogram telling me. First, we have histogram that represents correct exposure. This is extremely important to understand how we use a histogram to determine whether we have correct exposure or not. In this circumstance when I use the term correct, I really just mean a photograph that's not too bright and not too dark and it looks like what we saw out in the field with our eyes. We'll talk about over exposure when the histogram represents overexposed image. What it looks like when an image is underexposed, what a histogram looks like when you have a really high contrast photograph, and what it looks like when you have a low contrast photograph. Okay. So first cover what histogram looks like when you have correct exposure. If you take anything away from this lesson, it's definitely going to be this, which is that when you have a correctly exposed image, you're going to have a photograph that doesn't have any pixels touching the right edge of the graph, and there are no pixels touching the left edge of the graph. All of the pixels, all of the bars, so to speak, are going to be between pure white and between pure black. Then you have all of your gray tones in between. But when you have an image that's correctly exposed, you're not going to have pure white and pure black. Let's look at an image that correlates with this histogram. We've seen this image before earlier in our course and our discussion on proper exposure. We go back to the earlier lessons in this course. We looked at these different images. In this particular image, we have lots of mid tones. You see a huge spike in the mid tones. If you were to convert this image to black and white, you would see lots of pixels that were in the middle gray range. We don't have many pixels that are really bright or really dark. However, the most important information that our histogram is telling us is that we haven't overexposed this image because there's no pixels touching the right hand edge of the graph, and there are no pixels touching the left hand edge of the graph. This means that we haven't lost any light information by either blowing out our highlights or darkening down our shadows so much that we've lost detail in our shadows. Now, let's look at what happened when we overexpose an image. Let's look at what the histogram looks like in an over exposed to photograph. What happens is that you'll have pixels that start to touch or push up against the right hand edge of the histogram. What this means that all of the pixels that pile up on the right hand edge that you see right here, these are all going to be pure white. The more pixels that are pure white, the more information that we've lost in the scene means that we can't recover those details, not even in post processing. So whenever you have pixels that are touching the right hand edge of the histogram, it means that your image is too bright and that you need to darken it down using your exposure settings, F stop shutter speed and ISO. If we look at the image that correlates with this histogram, you can see that most of the tones in the sky are pure white, also in the snow. We just have blown out this image. We have over exposed it, so we've lost all of this detail in the sky and that cannot be recovered. Again, we see that in our histogram because we have all these tones touching the right hand side of the graph. Something to note here, when you have a really big spike in tones in a particular area on the histogram, you can see that it's cut off here. We can just assume that that spike goes much higher. But on your camera, it just has to cut off this spike for the sake of saving space. But we can just assume that that spike extends much higher than this. You can also see that we pretty much have almost no shadow tones and definitely no blacks in the scene. That correlates to what we see here in this photograph. We really don't see anything darker than mid tones. Even then, we don't even have that many mid tones. Most of these tones are at least highlights. It's just a way too bright image. Let's now look at what an under exposed histogram would look like. It's literally just the opposite. Histogram that shows an underexposed image will show pixels piling up on the left side of the graph. And this just means that we have so many pure black tones in the image that we have lost detail. We can't recover this detail, just like we couldn't recover the detail in the pure whites in the overexposed photograph. In the image that correlates with this histogram, you can see that there are a lot of pure black tones. You can see them in here and in here down here, back in here. There's just too many pure black tones or pixels in this photograph indicated by this bar that's piling up, touching the left hand edge of the histogram. Again, you can see this big spike here in the shadows, just showing us that the majority of the scene has lots of shadow tones, and then to a lesser extent mid tones, and really very few highlights and tones brighter than highlights. We see a little bit in the snow here, but in the sky as well, but just not very many of those brighter tones at all. This is an under exposed photograph, and before all we need to do is use our exposure settings, like you've learned throughout this course to bump up our exposure and shift this histogram back towards the middle, towards the right. Now let's look at a histogram for a high contrast image. This is one to know pretty well because oftentimes we're shooting high contrast images in landscape photography, especially at sunrise and sunset. We have really bright skies and really dark shadows. A high contrast image the histogram will look something like this, where we have a big spike in the brighter tones and a big spike in the darker tones. We're not going to have a lot of mid tones in between. If you see this U shape on your histogram, all that's showing is that you have a high contrast image. Let's look at what the photo looks like that correlates with this histogram. You can see that this is a very high contrast scene, specifically because I was shooting directly into the sun. And you'll notice that there are pixels that are touching the right hand edge of this histogram, that means we have pure bright pixels. And it's virtually unavoidable when you're shooting directly into the sun to not have a blown out sky, where the sun is, to not have pure white pixels, where the sun is. And that is okay when you're shooting into the sun. So that comes back to this whole idea of what is correct exposure. In this circumstance, even though we have pixels touching the right hand edge of a graph, that's okay in this situation because there's no way to capture all of these tones in a single photograph. At least you could, if you took something called HDR photography or used HDR photography, we're not going to talk about that now, but you will probably still least blow out a little bit of where the sun is. So just be aware that when you're shooting these high contrast scenes, it's okay to maybe blow out the sun a little bit. Then you can see that we have all of these shadows down in here, these darker tones, and that's indicated on the histogram by this big spike right here. You can see though that we haven't touched the left hand side of the graph, which means we haven't lost any detail in the shadows and we don't have any tones that are pure black. I would consider this a pretty well exposed photo because we captured the majority of the tones in this photo, blowing out the ones where the sun is, in my opinion, that's okay. Finally, a low contrast histogram will look something like this. You'll see almost like a bell curve with the peak in the mid tone. What we're looking at is a photograph where the majority of tones are in the mid tones. In this example, we don't have any tones touching pure white, and we don't have any tones touching pure black. This is what the photograph would look like for a histogram that looks something like this. This is a very low contrast image because we don't have super bright tones like we saw in the last image where we're shooting directly into the sun. We don't have very dark tones. It's a pretty muted neutral photograph, but there's nothing wrong with taking a photograph like this. This was what I would consider a properly exposed photograph. And that brings me to the next question that a lot of people ask, which is, does the shape of the histogram matter? The answer is no, the shape does not matter. These are just examples of different shapes of histograms. All the histogram is showing you is data is showing you information about the light and the scene that you're photographing. There's really no right or wrong shape to it. Only thing that we're really looking for is whether or not we have pixels that are touching the right hand edge or touching the left hand edge. That's what we're going to want to pay attention to because it will indicate whether our photograph is over exposed or under exposed. But basically just don't pay attention to the shape. The shape is really not that important. They'll help you determine what's going on in the scene, but don't focus too much on the shape. Really just focus on what's going on at the edges of your histogram. Those are the basic concepts when it comes to histograms are actually quite simple, and they get much easier to read the more you practice reading them. Let's review very briefly what you've learned in this lesson. A histogram is simply a bar graph used to visually describe information. Histograms used in photography graphically display the number of light and dark pixels in a photograph. We talked about how the pixels can range from pure black to pure white. And the histogram is just graphing all of those different tones, so we can visually see what's going on with the light in our photograph. The image histogram can tell you if you have overexposed or underexposed an image. This is really the most important part to understand about histograms. They are a tool used to determine whether you have over exposed or made your image too bright or underexposed or major image too dark. If part of the histogram is touching either the left or right side of the graph, then you can infer that you've lost detail your image due to under or over exposure. Remember, if you have any pixels piling up on the left side, the image is underexposed. If the pixels are touching the right side, you've over exposed your image, and you'll need to adjust your exposure settings to bring the histogram back within the range so that you don't have any pixels touching the left or the right hand side of the graph. There is no right or wrong shape of a histogram. The histogram is just giving us information. It shouldn't actually fit a specific shape. We can just read it and understand what's going on in our photograph, regardless of what the shape is, the image can still be properly exposed. It's something to keep in mind so that you don't feel like you're fixed on making the histogram look like a certain shape when you're out shooting in the field. That is it for our lesson on histograms. I hope you found this information useful and I hope you start to use this tool every time you take a photograph because it's really going to help you determine whether you have proper exposure in your photographs. If anything in this lesson was confusing, go back and rewatch it as many times as you need to allow it to sink in. Again, as always, the more you watch these lessons, the more you practice, the more it's going to make sense. Pull the histogram up on your camera and you start to experiment. Start to take different photographs and look at how they correlate with the histogram on your camera. That being said, happy shooting, have some fun with this, and I will see you guys soon.