This is the first blog post. This is where everything starts. Let's start with the basics. What are the basics? Well, first of all, when indulging in any sort of camerawork, one must know three settings - the ISO, the Shutter Speed, and the Aperture. These three basic settings control how much light the camera lets into a photograph, but are also responsible for many other things that contribute to the process of clicking a picture with a camera.
ISO
The ISO is a camera setting that controls a camera's sensitivity and exposure to light. In simple words - the higher the ISO is, the brighter a picture would be and vice versa. The sensors that let light into a camera are controlled by this setting. Places that are bright in nature like the outdoors on a sunny day, would be a good spot to click a picture with a low ISO camera setting. Darker places would require a higher ISO setting. It is quite complex though, taking pictures in the dark that is. It can come out as quite pixelated. This could be due to too much exposure; too much ISO. This is a problem that even I as a photographer deal with. Controlling ISO and understanding it takes time. The range of the ISO depends on the camera. I am also figuring it out while learning many new things as time goes on. This is just one of the settings, though.
Aperture
Aperture is a setting that also affects the brightness of a picture. It controls the opening of the lens to let light in. However, there is a much bigger role it plays in how a picture is clicked. Aperture also controls which part of a picture is in focus. This means, aperture can utilised to control a photo's focus on a background and foreground. For example, traditional portrait photography uses aperture to blur the background in order to put the focus on the subject in the photo, which in most cases is a person. A greater aperture number on your camera would let less light into the camera and vice versa. An aperture number usually has an "f" before it. For example, it looks like "f 5.6". A higher aperture also means that the foreground and background will both be in focus in a photo. A lower aperture is used in portrait photography a lot.
Shutter Speed
The third basic setting is known as the Shutter Speed. It also controls how much light is let into a picture but in a different way. The shutter speed controls the duration of how long your shutter stays open for, before closing and clicking a picture. The setting will usually appear on a camera in the form of fractions such as "1/2" or "1/2000", which means the shutter will stay open for 1/2 of a second or 1/2000 of a second, respectively. Slower shutter speeds are used in long-exposure photography, which is a type of photography that involves conveying the emotion of passing time through some stable subjects through many moving objects.
That is all for this article! I hope you get your hands on a camera and familiarise yourself with these settings. Please look out for the next article coming out on the 7th of August. Thank you!
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