the semi-holy trinity

No worries, this isn’t a religious post, unless you consider photography a religion, in which case we need to talk about other issues… some other time. No, I wanted to return to what I alluded to in my nifty fifty post–an exploration of scary words like aperture. I’ll just say right up front that although I know a little about this stuff, I’m no expert, and if you want to really learn about it, you need to read someone else’s article. Trust me, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles on this subject online. And now there will be one more.

The title has the word “trinity” in it, not as a religious allusion, but because there are three major technical factors which play into every image that comes out of your camera, and they all depend on each other. Change one and the other two (or at least one) have to adjust accordingly. Set two and your third one falls into place pretty easily. What is this trinity? It’s ISO, shutter speed, and aperture (f-stop). Now, I’ll remind you that if you’re shooting in one of your camera’s “basic” modes, like “portrait” or “sports” (I call mine the running man) or “landscape”, your camera is setting these for you. You may not know what it’s setting, but trust me, it’s setting things, and believe it or not, you could do it just as easily as the camera can and you might even do it better (once you understand what you’re doing, that is). So here goes:

• ISO: hey, remember back before say, 2000, when people didn’t really own digital cameras and we all had a little point-n-shoot 35 mm camera? And, you know, we had to buy rolls of film for it? Well, remember how you had to decide between 100 film for “bright sunny days” and 400 for “indoors” and 1600 for “fast action”? Those numbers referred to how sensitive to light the film was. The higher the number, the more sensitive to light, which meant you could shoot with less light (like indoors). The cost was grainy pictures. Well, with film, you still have ISO and if it helps you to think of it as film speed, then please do so. Think 100 for your highest quality shots where you have lots of light available; 400 is great for soccer games; 1600 is nice for indoors in darker situations. The less light you have, the higher ISO you want, or else you will end up with dark pictures.
• Shutter speed: this is simply how long the shutter of your camera is open. When you press the button and hear the camera click, an actual physical door opens (at least on DSLRs, I guess I can’t vouch for how smaller cameras do it). The shutter speed is a number which tells you how long that door is open. 1/100 means the shutter is open for 1/100 of a second. The longer the amount of time that’s open, the more motion blur you may get in your pictures. For example, if you’re taking pictures at your son’s soccer game, you probably don’t want to go below 1/250 of a second, because at slower speeds, you’ll see motion trails. At 1/80 of a second, even a moderate hand gesture during speaking will be blurred. 1/60 and slower, you’d better have that camera on a tripod because no matter how steady you think you are, your hands shake when you’re taking a picture.
• Aperture: for me personally, this is the really mind bending one. Inside the lens of your camera is a set of petals, like on a flower (caveat: remember I am not an expert, I’m just trying to clarify with what I know). You (or your camera) can actually make a decision about how big that opening is, and that can have pretty dramatic effects on your picture. If the opening is really big, that means a low aperture, which brings out that background blurriness that I personally dig. If the opening is small, that means a high aperture, which means that much more of your picture will be in focus (handy for group shots where you want the people in the back row to be just as sharp as the people in the front row). I believe the number relates to something mathematical, which means I don’t really want to know, but just remember that a small number (like 1.8) actually means a big opening; a big number (22) means a teeny opening.

Now, this all gets very exciting because each one of these numbers depends on the other two, kind of like a three legged stool. If the legs don’t all match, you’ll fall over as soon as you try to sit on the stool. To keep your stool level (level meaning a good exposure), you have to adjust all three to work together. You have some options for how to adjust them: (1) you can let the camera pick all three; (2) you can pick one and let the camera decide the other two; (3) you can set two and let the camera finish the last one; (4) or you can be really brave and set all three all by yourself. The same rules apply to you and to the camera in making these decisions. Just remember that you are smarter than your camera, which is why I recommend picking (3) or (4). Your camera can make relatively intelligent decisions about the amount of light available, but it honestly has no idea what you’re looking at.

In the interest of your brain, which may be melting at this point, I’ll defer more details for another post and instead will point you to a couple links as resources. The first is The Pioneer Woman, a hilarious blogger and tangential thinker (my kind of gal) who lives on a cattle ranch and loves photography. So she blogs about it. She blogs about a lot of other things, also (I’m hooked on Black Heels to Tractor Wheels), but for today I’ll point you to a post about Aperture. The other nifty link is to a fellow photographer’s spinoff site called My Fun Camera, which is designed to be a resource for you to learn more about your camera. She has a nifty little pocket sized camera guide for sale–kind of a cheat sheet for helping you know/remember what settings to use in a given situation. It’s very cute. I bought a set and have been working on giving them away.

So, take a deep breath, don’t think too hard about these very general definitions, and relax. My next shooting tips will talk about the practical applications (meaning I will uncover some of the mystery behind the basic settings on your camera!). And I’ll have pictures. Now I feel bad about not giving you a picture here. So here, from a recent trip to the beach with my own family:

Pretty, isn’t it? I did take pictures of my own children, too, but am saving the best for Father’s Day, so I can’t show it to you. Sorry. But you can see this one: