Photography Tips, Tutorials & Techniques

This post was written by photographer Belinda Greb. To view Belinda’s work, please visit the websites in her bio at the bottom of this page.

Every photographer has their own process that begins just before they take the picture and ends when they have a finished file ready for printing. No one process is correct, but nearly every photographer I’ve talked to is curious about how others process their photographs. I think most of us are eager to learn and refine our own processes in an effort to make our images better and more in line with the vision we have inside our head and want to express.

Some photographers believe that most everything should be done in the camera with very little processing on the back end. That is all very well if you can wait for the perfect light, the perfect moment, and if what you are aiming for is a realistic representation of what you are seeing (an arguable aim since a camera cannot yet match the amazing complexity of our eyes). While I agree that you should try and do as much as you can in the camera, especially in regards to composition, exposure and aperture, I love the post process. That is where the image becomes truly my own via selection, choice, and artistic process. I am not a fan of adding color, sharpening, saturation, etc. via the camera, but to each his own.

This post will be about my own general process. I’ve modified my process after I’ve learned new software or techniques and will continue to do so.

I rarely use a batch process. I might make some Lightroom adjustments to a group of similar images taken within a span of 5-10 minutes, but each image will be processed individually. That’s just me. I’m not doing stock photography where batch processing would be very helpful. I like concentrating on one image at a time. For whatever image I choose to work on, that image has beckoned to my sensibility in its own way. Each is a unique entity that I sit and look at and decide what to emphasize what is needed. Some need more work than others. A photograph may be technically perfect but leave me cold, and one can be flawed but still be something I want to work.

Camera Settings

First, I shoot in RAW. My camera color and picture settings on my camera are Adobe RGB and Neutral. I prefer to make color adjustments as part of the post process as opposed to a formula within the camera that is making those decisions for me.

I try to set my ISO at the lowest possible setting and shoot mostly in Aperture-mode, but I often change exposure compensation on the fly and sometimes switch to Manual-mode as well. If I’m shooting wildlife, I set my camera to spot-metering, and for landscapes, evaluative. I am adept at changing my auto-focusing points as I go, and though I try to veer away from a center focus point, I use my instinct for composition, and don’t really pay attention to “rules” as I shoot. I will manually fine-tune my auto focusing especially when using my telephoto in low light, but generally no longer rely on my eyes to manually focus.

Selection

Unless I’m running out of disc space in the field (which has happened), I don’t delete photographs from the camera. Once I import my photographs onto my computer, I have a simple and fast method of ranking. I mark everything with 1 star. Then I go through on an Adobe Bridge slideshow. If an image is beyond help, I reset the stars to 0. I work quickly employing my first impressions and zooming in quickly to 100% to check on sharpness. Anything over 3 stars gets taken into Lightroom and then I start to work on the photographs that I’m most excited about.

Note on Lightroom

I started using Lightroom almost two years ago when I swallowed the bitter pill of subscription and decided to upgrade to the Photoshop CC from my Creative Suite 5. I don’t use Lightroom for a file management system as I was already using Adobe Bridge. I do initially title imported Raw files with the place/subject, date, and sequence number. I don’t take the time to use key-wording up front, because the sites I upload to have different formats, I’m impatient to get right into the processing, and it is a tedious process I prefer to do only for the photos I’m going to upload. Lightroom has an intuitive and streamlined RAW processing which I believe is superior to the Photoshop RAW processing which is also very good.

Starting the Process with Lightroom (LR)

For the purpose of this piece, I will be taking you through the processing of one photograph from start to finish. Right away you will see that this photo had some type of weird blue spot – a result of my lens hood and the lens being used at its widest, 24mm. This happens on occasion, but not for every 24mm shot. I haven’t taken the time to analyze why – possibly the direction of light? This was a handheld morning shot, at 400 ISO, a shutter speed of 200 and 8.0 aperture opening. It’s a shot that might have been better with a tripod, but the tripod was probably up the hill in the parking lot (a very steep hill I might add). If I had used a tripod, though, I could have reduced the ISO to 100 and used a narrower aperture setting, but who know what the effect would have been on the water, as the exposure would have been lengthened.

The fix for the blue corner spot was easy, as the sky was fairly flat and the area small. I simply used the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom using clone rather than heal, and feathering and opacity at fairly high levels, but not 100%. If the fix needed was more complex, I would have waited to fix in Photoshop. I also like to fix any lens spots from dust or water at this point. I thoroughly cleaned my lens before my vacation, but hiking and shooting in a changing climate, you end up with spots. You often won’t see them until you zoom in at 100%.

LR is designed so that processing is done in the order of the sections. I consistently make the following LR adjustments: Basic adjustments (using sliders to adjust highlights, shadows, even exposure, up clarity ad contrast a smidgeon). Then I make finer adjustments in the next tab down, Tone Curve. I also do some preliminary sharpening in Details along with noise reduction, and finally adjust Lens Corrections (it will pick up on the lens you’ve used). In this last area, you can also straighten for horizons.

This is the photograph after initial LR adjustments. You can see that contrast, clarity, and structure have improved especially in the clouds, the smaller mountain in the foreground’s detail and the reflection. Note the change in the histogram between the last exhibit and this. Also note the tools near the top of the LR Panel below the histogram. I will sometimes use the Cropping Overlay (1st), and the Graduated and Radial Filters to adjust exposure and highlights for selected areas (4th and 5th) as well as the Spot Removal Tool (2nd).

Photoshop (PS) and Nik Color Efex (CE)

Next I will open the image up in Photoshop. A couple of years back I added the Nik Collection as a plug in to Photoshop. I really love this suite of products. I consistently use Color Efex, Define and Output Sharpening. The Nik Collection makes use of Control Points that you use to selectively apply changes. You can also adjust opacity levels, on the Control Points.

Color Efex has a slew of filters. I almost always use Tonal Contrast. This brings out detail and contrast. I can use a control point to add the effect to just one or a few areas, or the effect will be applied to the whole area, except where I add a control point to exclude an area(s). The control points also have an opacity slider. The red line seen in the next screen shot is a slider in CE that you can slide back and forth to see the before and after.

Another two effects I often use in CE are either the Dark/Lighten Center or Vignette Lens. Here I chose the Dark/Lighten Center. You can place your center to subtly highlight the area you want to be the center of your image.

Other favorites, but not used for this image are Sunlight, which softens and gives a romantic golden light to the image or Glamour glow where the glow is more subtle and doesn’t have a color cast.

Accepting the changes, I bring the image back to PS where I could adjust the opacity of the CE layer or add a mask. In this case, I did neither. The changes are subtle for this image as I went easy on the tonal contrast since the mist of the shifting clouds creates an ethereal mood that would be lost or diminished with higher contrasts.

Noise Reduction and Sharpening

Now, one downside of digital photography is that a camera sensor does create noise, especially at a high ISO (equivalent of a faster film). Other things that create noise are long exposures and applied filters via CE or HDR software. Define in CE is what I go to first to decrease noise, but if I’m not satisfied with the results, I will try Topaz DeNoise or PS noise reduction instead. Once I have a noise reduction layer, I almost always add a layer mask to the result. Any noise reduction program works by blurring pixels. If you look at your image (you should be sporadically checking the image at 100%), you will see noise is more evident in certain areas than others: blue skies, big areas of continuous colors, shadows. By using a mask, you can apply the noise reduction in the areas that need it the most and minimize the reduction or leave other areas alone.

The same goes for sharpening. I use Nik’s Sharpener Pro 3: (2) Output Sharpener, most of the time and always with a mask. However, if I’m not satisfied, I will try PS’s Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen or for some photos, I’ve been experimenting with the Shake Reduction Sharpener. It’s important to realize if the image is being printed, it will be a bit softer than what shows on your screen, and the larger the print is, more sharpening will be needed.

Masks and Luminance Masks

Rather than painting your own masks, it’s much faster to either use a color channel to create a mask or a luminance mask. I love luminance masks and use Jimmy McIntyre’s free action downloads. Once you add the masks, they will be added to your channels panel, right beneath the color channels. These are a series of bright, dark and mid-tone masks that are added to your channels panel. If red, green or blue works, then don’t bring them in as they increase your file size dramatically.

Click on the best mask for your image, then click on the marching ants icon, return to layers panel and add a layer mask. Remember that on masks, black conceals, white reveals. Sometimes I might choose a color mask and then invert it.

Once you’re near the end of your processing, remember to delete the luminance mask to reduce your file size.

Below, you will see the mask I used on the sharpening for this image. I modified it by painting black on some areas where I wanted less sharpening. Compare the initial chosen mask (one of JM’s dark luminance masks) and then the modified mask below.

I also added a vibrancy layer with a mask to bring up intensity of color in water and mountain.

I still wanted a bit more color intensity to match what I remembered, so I copied a layer, ran a high pass PS filter, then reduced using a luminosity mode (under Menu/Edit/Fade), and blended that layer via Soft Light. I again dialed back on this effect by reducing the opacity to 70% and using the same luminosity mask I used on the Vibrance Layer.

Changes

For this particular image, the individual steps weren’t drastic, yet the post processing not only corrected some flaws like a slightly slanted horizon line, lens spots (from water or dust spots), and noise, but also worked to bring out detail, contrast and color from the RAW file.

The first photo below shows the image as it was when first imported to Lightroom, and the second image is what I uploaded to my website. Again, the process might include fewer or more steps for another image, but I do hope this has been interesting to you.

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Belinda Greb is a nature and wildlife photographer from Vida, Oregon. With years of experience capturing her environment on camera, she excels at translating what she discovers while traveling, hiking or walking through everyday life into an art for all to appreciate. Belinda also holds a master’s in English literature. If you’d like to learn more about Belinda, please visit her website. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Since the first day I began working on computers, I have concerned myself with how I would store all my precious data. And through the years, after much trial and error, I think I’ve discovered a fairly decent way to set up my “system” of file storage. In today’s post, I’m going to share that system with you.

The whole impetus behind this post is that I’m currently upgrading Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to their most recent releases. At the time of this writing, those would be the Creative Cloud 2015 versions. Now, like I mentioned above, I’ve had a decent routine for quite a while. The difference with this week is that I’m also upgrading my computer. So, it’s probably needless to say that things are getting shuffled around. I thought it would be a good time to share some tips – especially if you’re new to photography.

Where To Put Your Pictures

As I began meandering through this week’s ordeal, I thought back to how I’ve enjoyed storing my photos in the past and how I should store my photographs in the future. I considered my options.

1. The first option is the most obvious. I could simply create some folders on my local computer hard drive and fill those folders up with all my goodies. I have to say, this option is the most common one folks tend to choose.

2. The second option is to pick up an external hard drive, create those same folders and put my pictures there. This is probably the second most common route people take today.

3. The third option, and this one only came to light recently, is to store all my photos in the cloud. If you’ve heard of the cloud, you surely understand how much traction this option is getting.

I’d like to walk through each of what I just mentioned above. They all have their merits and drawbacks, so this will be some good information.

Local Hard Drive

I’ll discuss the local hard drive option first. If you’ve got an older computer with a small hard drive (fewer than 500GBs), you’re going to have some issues storing all your files locally. If you’ve been shooting for any length of time, I’m sure you’re aware of how fast drives fill up with all your wonderful creations. While this isn’t that big of a deal while shooting JPEG’s, it will become much more apparent when you begin shooting RAW. RAW files will eat your drive for lunch. They’ll sneak up on you and run away with your computer when you aren’t looking.

Now, if you’ve purchased your computer recently and chose to accompany it with a larger drive (greater than 1TB), you can, and should, use that drive as a “working drive.” What I mean by working is that you can, after a shoot, plug your camera in and pull your photos off. On my desktop, I have a “working” folder that I use to review all photos before I put them in long term storage. I’ve found that this works well because it’s super simple to navigate and work from this location. I even store files on my local drive temporarily if I’m thinking about what I’d like to do with them. At times, they pile up, but I do eventually move them to their permanent homes.

While working from your local computer is fine, storing files on it isn’t. The reason for this is, one morning, you’re going to wake up, stumble downstairs to your desk and attempt to turn your computer on. It isn’t going to happen. Your computer may not turn on at all or you may see the infamous blue screen. What I’m trying to tell you is that, one day, you’re computer is going to fry and you’re going to be out of luck. I’ve seen this happen so many times I don’t even want to think about it.

The moral of this story is to never store files on your local computer long term.

External Hard Drive

Right now, I have two external hard drives. One is 1TB and the other is 2TB. In the coming weeks, I’ll be purchasing a nice new 5TB drive that should hold all my photos for years to come. I’m looking forward to working in that drive.

External hard drives are great for storing photos because they’re huge and cheap. The 5TB drive I’m looking at is only $124. Considering what a drive like this would have cost years ago, I’d say that’s not bad at all.

Another nice thing about external drives is that you can stack them. You can add and add as many as you’d like. All you have to do is either plug them into existing USB ports or, if you don’t have many ports, plug them in when you need them. And, as I mentioned above, the cheaper and larger they get, the more photos you can keep.

Lastly, external hard drives have served me well through the years. They have fewer moving parts than an entire computer and they are the first solution I talk about when I see someone crying because their computer just left for computer heaven. They’ve got great seek times and transfer data fairly quickly with USB3. Honestly, there isn’t a reason to not be using external hard drives to store your photos.

Cloud Storage

A relatively new option for storing data is cloud storage. As of this writing, I know of many cloud storage options with new ones popping up daily. This method of data storage has taken the world by storm and is quite effective.

The thing with cloud storage is, it costs money. While external drives are a one time payment, most cloud based storage options charge monthly. I suppose you can do the math to see which is cheaper, but there’s something in my head that tells me that if I store 5TB of data on a hard drive and let that sit for 10 years, that storage only cost me $124. If I let those same files sit in the cloud, I would get charged monthly for 120 months. Hmmm – I’m not sure I like that.

Another consideration with cloud storage is internet speed. In Maine, where I live, we’re lucky to have internet at all. I happen to have extremely slow “fast” internet, but for the rest of the folks who live on my one mile long, dirt road in the middle of nowhere, dial-up it is. Dial-up. Yes, you read that correctly. With my internet connection, if I attempted to use cloud storage, I’d be waiting all day for my files to transfer. It wouldn’t be a pretty picture.

Now, if you’re living in San Francisco or someplace that’s got blazing fast internet or if you’re a traveling photographer who needs access to your files all the time, cloud storage is a really great option. By going this route, you’ll always be able to get to your photos and will have the ability to see them across devices as well. You’ve got to think about the situation you’re in and make a choice from there.

As you can see, there’s a lot to think about when it comes to storing photos. I can tell you conclusively not to store them on your computer. Whether you’d like to put them on external hard drives or in the cloud – well, that’s up to you. They’re both really good options.

Backing Up Your Photographs

I’ve got some bad news for you. I know that we just finished talking about the ins and the outs of storing photographs, but we need to have another talk. It’s about backing up data. I’ll offer you a short story to warm you up.

A few years ago, I worked with a girl who was new into sales. She was probably the most eager sales girl I’ve ever seen. Every day, she aggressively pursued clients and was actively building contacts, sales and was making some money. She kept meticulous notes and kept them all on her laptop.

I remember sitting at my desk one day when I heard someone crying. I got up to see who it was and when I rounded the corner, I found this poor sales girl at her desk, head in hands. She was sitting in front of a dead computer. Yes, you know exactly what happened, so I won’t bore you with the details. It happens to everyone. She lost everything. She had no backup. She had no recourse. It was really gone and no one, as hard as they tried, could get it back.

If someone walked in your house right now, picked up your computer and walked out. Where would your photos be? If there was a natural disaster and you’re computer was lost forever, would you ever see your photos again? What’s the first thing people say after a house fire, right after they check to see if everyone is okay? “I lost all my photos.”

Now, I know that I just mentioned “your computer,” but I want to impress upon you that all these scenarios are true for external drives as well. All hard drives die. And I can only guess that the pain gets worse relative to hard drive size. If I had a 5TB external hard drive filled to the gills and discovered that it didn’t work one day, I’d be devastated.

So, what’s the solution to all these horrible scenarios? Back up, back up and back up some more. You won’t find one source in the entire world that will tell you that backing up your data is a bad idea. Not one.

Remember those external hard drives I talked about? Double up on them and use half as backups. Remember though, just backing them up isn’t enough. You’ve got to keep them safe as well. You can store them off site or in a 2-hour fire rated security safe. You’ve got to keep them away from floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires and anything else you can think of. You’ve got to tell me how to get to your life-long collection of photographs as we both watch someone run away with your working copies. You’ve got to have easy access if disaster strikes. Think external hard drive, think fire/security safe, think cloud storage. Just think.

How To Organize Your Folders & Files

As you may have noticed, I’m sort of a nut when it comes to backing up data. When that sales girl lost everything, it made an impression. I vowed to never let that happen to me. And as I sit here, I still think it’s inevitable. Some how, some way, something terrible is going to happen. That’s why I back up like a mad-man.

If I’m going to go through all the trouble to back up my photographs, I want the process to be easy. I don’t want to have to struggle and wade through hundreds, or potentially thousands, of folders and files. I want things to be super organized. And in this section, I’ll fill you in on some of my techniques.

Create One Folder

Like I just mentioned, the last thing I want to do is to hunt down what I need to back up. With this in mind, way back when, I created one folder and called it “Media.” This is the folder I grab and copy or use to sync across drives. I’ll get to syncing later.

Create Sub-Folders

Inside my Media folder, I created three more folders. They are called “Photos,” Video” and “Music.” Since this is a post about the storing of photographs, I’ll focus primarily on the Photos folder. The other two are for my video production along with the sound files I use in those videos. I also store all my personal music in that music folder as well.

Create Year-Based Sub-Folders

I know of a few folks who like to categorize their sub-folders by topic. They call them things like “Concerts,” “Vacations,” “Sports,” etc…I am not particularly fond of this approach. I actually find it very confusing. What if one shoot covered multiple topics? If I stored my photos based on topic, I’d surely get lost as I tried to pull those photos up to work on them.

I like to store photos chronologically. I’ve got photos dating back to the early part of the century and I can’t tell you how simple it is for me to double click my “2002” folder to find everything that happened in 2002.

So, create year-based sub-folders inside your “Photos” folder. Go all the way back to the year of your first shoot and then add a new folder the first of every new year. It’s that easy.

Create Name-Based Sub-Folders

If I went hiking on the Airline Rail Trail in November of 2012, I would create a sub-folder called “11-Airline-Rail-Trail.” The “11” is the month and the “Airline-Rail-Trail” is the topic. If I went hiking again in December of the same year, I’d create a new folder with a 12 at the beginning of it.

If someone asked me if I took any pictures in Connecticut in 2008, I could easily open my Media folder, click into the Photos folder, click into the 2008 folder and have a look around. If they were concerned with a particular month, I could quickly scan the numbers at the front of each folder to see if I had anything for that month. And by putting numbers at the beginning, I can sort easily.

That’s it. That’s how I store my photos. I think my method is really organized and through all the years, I haven’t found one I like better. Feel free to use it.

Synchronize Folders & Files Between Computers & Drives

I want to preface this last section by telling you not to feel strange if you currently have a photo storage method that isn’t all too organized. Life gets the best of us and really, the last thing we often think of is keeping things neat. The trick is to stay on top of your flow and work off of a system. If you do that, good habits will form quickly.

I’m going to talk about the easiest way to back up or “sync” your photographs and data across all those external hard drives you may have or are now planning to pick up. There’s a really fast and easy way to take care of keeping all your drives up to date that doesn’t involve deleting everything on one drive to copy everything from another drive. That’s a miserably slow way of doing things. I know. I used to do that.

What you want to do is grab yourself a copy of a syncing program and install it on your computer. I use Microsoft’s SyncToy, but if you’re on a Mac, look around a bit. I’m sure there’s something out there that’s good and free. After installation, simply set it up and you’re good to go.

The wonderful thing about syncing your files and folders as opposed to deleting them all and starting over is that you lessen the risk of losing your data during the operation. When I used to do this, I’d have concerns that after I deleted everything on one drive, the other one was going to explode, leaving me with nothing. It’s also dreadfully slow.

When you sync, you’re merely using a piece of software to scan both drives. They find what’s already existing on both and discover what’s new or what’s been removed. If you have one file that’s new on one drive and have deleted seven files on the other, only eight files will be updated. It takes minutes instead of hours.

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During my early years with photography, I did a lot of shooting in various automatic modes. It wasn’t until later that I began exploring the plethora of manual options my camera offered. And while, during those later times, I enjoyed the enormous creativity priority modes and my range of lenses offered, it wasn’t until much more recently that I dove head first into the fine workings of exposure. And as you may have noticed from all the posts on this website, the subject is deep and a lifelong learning endeavor.

While the concepts behind exposure take a little while to understand, they aren’t too challenging to pick up and use in the field. They’re sort of like the learning curve someone experiences when facing a musical instrument for the very first time. They are all thumbs in the beginning, but within a few weeks or months, playing becomes second nature.

There’s a tool in your camera’s exposure settings that many folks shy away from. I’ll admit that I completely understand why that is – because this tool looks a bit intimidating. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’m talking about your camera’s histogram. The thing is, the histogram is an immensely valuable part of your camera’s exposure arsenal and gauging from what users of it say, it’s essential to good photography.

I’m going to break this post down into bite sized chunks in an effort to make the topics as easily digestible as possible. First, I’m going to show you how you might find the histogram on your camera and what it looks like. Next, I’ll define the histogram – I’ll tell you exactly what it measures and why that matters. After that, I’ll go over how you can use it in the field and how it can help better your camera’s exposure. And lastly, I’ll offer some real life examples of viewing subjects through a camera, while analyzing the histogram and adjusting exposure compensation to alter the histogram’s output for, as the title of this post suggests, awesome photos.

Finding & Looking at Your Camera’s Histogram

Now, just to be clear, there are a few types of histograms that are available on DSLR cameras. The first type and the one most photographers think of when someone mentions the word “histogram,” is for overall brightness display of the photograph. The next type is for primary color (RGB) brightness display. I’ll be covering the meanings of both of these types of histograms in the next section.

To show you how to display a histogram, I used my trusted Canon T3i. If you have a different make or model of camera, simply refer to your owner’s manual for instructions on how to review your histogram.

On the camera I used, I chose to view the frame through the LCD screen. From there, I cycled through the various screens until I found the one that showed the histogram. To cycle through the screens, I pushed the “DISP.” button that’s to the left of the viewfinder multiple times. This is what the LCD screen looked like after I metered the camera:

Canon T3i Histogram Display

If you’ll notice the small bar graph in the upper right corner, that’s the histogram.

Now, after I took a photograph, I reviewed it by pushing down the playback button that’s located just outside the lower right corner of the LCD screen. Once the photo I was interested in appeared, I again cycled through the display options by pushing the “DISP.” button multiple times. A few screens were shown, but for this example, I was only interested in two of them.

Canon T3i Histogram Photo Review

The above photo shows only the brightness display histogram and the photo below shows the RGB brightness histogram, followed by the brightness display histogram.

Canon T3i RGB Histogram Photo Review

Again, the bar graphs you see in these photos are the histograms. Now that we’ve reviewed how we can find the histograms and what they look like, let’s move into the nitty gritty of what these things are and why they’re so important in photography.

What Are Histograms & Why Are They So Important?

If you think about it, all cameras do is collect light and transform that light into a representation of what we, as humans, see. And once the light is discovered by the camera (by us pointing it at something and metering), it can give us all sorts of information on it. One such example of information is the brightness level of our frame.

What Is a Histogram?

Most every photo you take is going to have a range of bright and dark elements in it. As a simple example of this, pretend that you point your camera at a background that’s pure white with a black square in it. Say the white takes up 75% of the frame and the black takes up 25%. If you’ve got your histogram displaying in your LCD like I showed above, you should see two thin lines. One line will be all the way to the right that reaches 75% of the way to the top of the histogram and the other line should be all the way to the left and reach only 25% of the way to the top. It’s that simple. The brightness histogram merely shows us the range of brightness across our potential photograph. And like I pointed out above, the other set of histograms will show us our brightness levels after we’ve taken the photo.

Take a look at the gradient I created below. This is a very simple example of how the range of brightness is distributed across a histogram. The darkest representation is on the left and the lightest on the right.

Camera Histogram Range

The same is true for the RGB histograms I covered in the previous section. Each one of those histograms displays the brightness of each color, when separated out, of the subject you’re metering. If you’re focusing on a very bright red rose in daylight, the red histogram is going to display a surge over to the right side. Alternately, if you’re focusing on a dark blue car at dusk, the blue histogram is going to display a surge over to the left.

Simply put, histograms give us a graphical representation of the brightness levels of the pixels in our photographs. The brighter they are, the more the histogram will show activity to the right and the darker they are, the more the histogram will show activity to the left.

How Can Histograms Help Us Take Better Photos?

Think about the horizontal axis of a histogram as a scale from 0 to 255. We’ll call that the “safety zone.” If you’re taking normal photos in normal light, each vertical line in the histogram’s scale should be contained within the scale. Take a look at this example of a photo with its corresponding histogram below.

Normal Histogram

Notice how the vertical lines (or wave) are all contained within the safety zone. This would be considered a well exposed photograph.

Now, take a look at the following photo. This time, I captured the sun in the photo, which throws the lighting off.

Overexposed Photograph Histogram

Notice how the vertical lines look pretty good, until you get all the way to the right. On the “bright” side, we’ve got a problem. We have a spike of pure white which represents the sun and all the shimmering of the sun’s light reflecting off the water. The spike we see is telling us that the vertical lines want to run off the scale. The photo is overexposed. In this case, however, we know that the sun will cause this, so this type of histogram is to be expected.

What if, for some reason, our camera wasn’t reading our environment correctly? Say there was something in it that was tripping up our exposure and because of that, the entire photograph was being metered as overexposed. I’ll use the first example photo from above and over expose it slightly. Check out the histogram then.

Overexposed Photograph

From looking at this photo, we can see that it’s overexposed. The whites are blown out and the sky looks a little weird. If you look at the histogram in the photo, you’ll see that we have another vertical line over to the right that’s shooting up where it shouldn’t be. This line is telling us that our photo, if taken, will contain over exposed elements. If we want them there, then fine, but if we don’t want them there, we’ll have to adjust our exposure compensation to deal with it.

So here’s the big question – how can a histogram assist us in taking properly exposed photographs in the field? The answer to that is fairly simple. Pretend that I was looking at the LCD screen on the back of my camera while taking the photographs I used as examples above. As you can see, the day I took those photos was extremely bright. If you’ve ever attempted to look at a screen like those that cameras offer, you surely know that you can’t see very much detail. Even in normal light, the LCD screen doesn’t offer an accurate representation of the lighting of your scene. The primary purpose of an LCD screen on a camera is to give you a larger view of what you’re taking a photo of, not to accurately represent its lighting or color.

By utilizing your camera’s histogram, you can get a much better “picture” of what’s going on, exposure-wise. While you most likely won’t be able to analyze each and every vertical line in the graph properly, you will most likely be able to pick up on if something is far too dark or far too bright. It’s that mathematical communication that cameras can offer that helps immensely. And once you start talking about histograms to other photographers, you’ll begin noticing how the better ones swear by their use.

How the Histogram Helps You Take Better Photos

Remember, your camera’s histogram isn’t a hard and fast rule that’s to be obeyed 100% of the time. It’s more of a tool that can assist you in adjusting your exposure for better photographs. If you have proper exposure, you can enhance your photos in a piece of post-processing software, such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop later on. The trick is, you need as much data as possible to be captured by your camera. If you have too many overexposed or underexposed areas in your photo, you might not have the data you need because those areas most likely fall outside of your camera’s dynamic range. Those areas are a challenge to edit later on.

In this final section, I’m going to take seven photographs of the same subject while using the histogram for guidance. Each photo will have a different exposure compensation setting to show you how the histogram changes throughout the compensation scale. My purpose for this exercise is to simply display the relationship between improperly and properly exposed photographs and their histograms. In the photos below, notice how the histogram curve leans to the left for the darker (underexposed) photos and to the right for the lighter (overexposed) photos. Also notice how the curve hangs out in the middle for the properly exposed photos.

Under-Exposed Photograph by 3 Stops

Under-Exposed Photograph by 2 Stops

Under-Exposed Photograph by 1 Stop

Properly Exposed Photograph

Over-Exposed Photograph by 1 Stop

Over-Exposed Photograph by 2 Stops

Over-Exposed Photograph by 3 Stops

By reviewing the above photos, one can argue for either the over or underexposed photos by 1 stop or the properly exposed photograph, based on taste and preference. And again, there’s really no rule when it comes to exposure. The primary concern is that the data you’re capturing with your camera falls inside the parameters of what your camera can handle and that it can be used later on in post processing. If your shadows are too pronounced or your highlights are completely washed out, you may end up with an unusable picture.

When taking photos with the histogram in view or reviewing photos while looking at the histogram, it’s important that you get a “feel” for what the shape should be for your particular scene. While every picture won’t have a pretty “bell shaped” histogram, it will have a curve that coincides with the best exposure you’re going to get. The trick is to practice and learn what good histograms look like. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll likely fall into the category of photographers who shoot photos with proper exposure and who swear by the histogram.

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I’ve talked a lot about exposure when it comes to photography on this website. Much of my discussion focused primarily on how to set your camera properly for the lighting conditions you face as a photographer. And most of the time, through the settings you choose, accurate and appropriate exposure is achieved. There are occasions though, when you might need to “compensate” for tricky lighting situations. Times when your camera simply can’t do it on its own. And for these instances, exposure compensation is the answer.

In this post, I’m going to talk about many topics surrounding exposure compensation. I’ll discuss what it is and when you might need to use it. I’ll even offer some example photographs to demonstrate the differences between various compensation settings.

What Is Exposure Compensation?

The idea behind exposure compensation is to give the photographer control over lighting when the camera doesn’t do a good job at deciphering what the photographer’s intent is. Just a few evenings ago, I was attempting to take some photographs of the blue moon when I ran into difficulties – the pictures I was taking came out wildly over exposed. It wasn’t until I adjusted my camera’s exposure compensation that I began taking photos that were an accurate representation of what I was seeing with my eyes.

When setting exposure compensation on your DSLR camera, you’re generally given the ability to adjust exposure in one stop increments, with one third stop increments between them. When compensating exposure, all the camera is doing is overriding it’s previous selections relative to its new setting.

To better explain this concept, take a look at the photos below.

Canon T3i Exposure Compensation Setting

First, just to explain what you’re looking at, the exposure compensation setting is the scale that runs from -3 to 0 to +3. By holding down the small button towards the upper right that says “Av+-” and turning the dial right behind the shutter button back and forth, you can scroll up and down this scale.

In this first picture above, I simply turned the camera on and metered it. As you can see, in “Program” mode, my Canon T3i feels that, because of the given light, the shutter speed should be set at 1/25 of a second, the aperture should be open to F4.5 and the ISO should have a sensitivity of 400. Now, take a look at this next shot:

Canon T3i Exposure Compensation Setting Under Exposed by One Stop

For this picture, I merely adjusted the exposure compensation down one stop, to under expose any resulting photos. Look at the small tick mark beneath the “1” on the right side of the scale. If you’ll notice, the shutter speed has increased to 1/50 of a second, while aperture and ISO remained the same. This isn’t always the case. If I was under different lighting conditions, all these of these parameters may have changed, depending on what the camera thought was best.

Because I was purposefully underexposing this shot by one stop, the camera adjusted the shutter speed by one stop. Remember, a “stop” is simply a halving or doubling of light.

Canon T3i Exposure Compensation Setting Over Exposed by One Stop

In this final example, I set the exposure compensation on the camera to over expose by one stop. Again, the camera only adjusted shutter speed, and since I wanted more light to hit the sensor, it decreased shutter speed by one stop (increasing light), resulting in the shutter staying open twice as long it it would have if there was no compensation at all.

What About Priority Modes?

You may be wondering what happens if you adjust exposure compensation while shooting in priority modes. This is actually an important topic, because without being aware of its effects, exposure compensation can, and will, affect the sensitivity of shutter speed and aperture settings in ways you might not expect. It you’re in action or creative environments, this type of adjustment could be detrimental to your results.

Here’s the rule: If you’re in shutter priority mode and adjust exposure compensation down one stop, the camera will shrink your aperture by one stop, while maintaining your shutter speed. This change in setting will under expose your resulting photograph by one stop. Similarly, if you’re in aperture priority mode and adjust exposure compensation up one stop, the camera will slow down shutter speed by one stop, resulting in a photography that’s over exposed by one stop. It’s really that simple. By adjusting exposure compensation, all you’re doing is telling the camera to change the exposure of the photograph by altering a setting that isn’t “locked” in by a priority mode. You do need to be careful though, because, as I mentioned above, if you adjust exposure too far, your photographs might not come out as you expect them to.

Exposure Compensation Example Photos

For the examples below, I took seven photographs of the same flower. I began by adjusting the exposure compensation to the lowest possible setting and then continued up to the highest possible setting. As you’ll see below, the results are quite dramatic.

Bright flowers like this oftentimes cause cameras to over expose, so I wanted to view the output throughout the entire range. Also, it was interesting to watch the camera adjust settings as I metered for each shot. Below, I’ll list the metering settings:

Camera Settings Based On Exposure Compensation

I’ll list each group of settings in the order of exposure compensation, shutter speed, aperture size and ISO. While viewing the above photo, you can apply these setting from left to right. Also, while taking these pictures, I had the camera in “Program” mode.

Compensation, Shutter Speed, Aperture, ISO
-3, 1000, 11, 100
-2, 800, 10, 100
-1, 500, 9, 100
0, 400, 7.1, 100
+1, 250, 6.3, 100
+2, 200, 5.6, 200
+3, 200, 5.6, 400

In my opinion, while taking photos of bright flowers like this, it may be beneficial to set the exposure compensation down by one stop. I think more detail becomes apparent at that setting. If your photos are too dark, you can easily brighten them up to your liking in post-processing.

When To Take Advantage of Exposure Compensation

If you’ve ever tried to take photographs of subjects that contrasted greatly with their backgrounds, you’ve surely experienced your camera having difficulty correctly setting exposure for those situations. These types of settings may include objects of normal brightness that are situated against very bright backgrounds, such people, animals, trees or flowers against the bright blue sky. When you let the camera set for this type of shot, you’ll usually end up with a picture of a silhouette. The sky is simply too bright and the result is an underexposed photo of the subject.

Conversely, like I mentioned above, if you’ve ever attempted to take a picture of a very bright object that’s set against a dark background, such as the moon at night, the result will be a severely overexposed photo. The camera meters for all that darkness and the bright moon gets washed out in the process.

For both of these situations, utilizing the exposure compensation setting is a great solution. You can take multiple photographs at multiple settings and then choose the best ones while reviewing them on your computer.

Lastly, cameras also face challenges while taking photos of objects that vary greatly in shade. So, if you attempt to take a picture of a black and white yin and yang symbol, for instance, you’ll likely end up with either an under or over exposed photograph, depending on your background. It’ll take your manual input to gauge what “correct” is.

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I hope you enjoyed this post on camera exposure compensation. If you did, please share the post with friends or those who you think might appreciate it. Also, if you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the space below. If you’d like to learn more photography tips and tutorials, check out the “Photography” link at the top of this page. Lastly, if you’d like to receive our posts by email, simply sign up for our newsletter and we’ll deliver every one of our posts directly to your inbox. Thanks!

In photography, really cool lenses are those mysterious pieces of gear that everyone loves to talk about, but few have enough money to afford. We read about them on our favorite photography websites and drool over the pictures they take. And as we browse the sites of the photographers we admire most, our guts tells us that these are the guys who enjoy the very finest of glass. I mean, after all, shooting with a good lens means the difference between an okay shot and an awesome shot.

In this post, I’m going to start exploring exactly what camera lenses are. I’ll discuss what types of components make up a lens and what characteristics of a lens define its field of view. I’ll also discuss field of view as it pertains to the camera itself. Spoiler alert – it has to do with image sensor size. Lastly, I’m going to talk about the two types of lenses photographers shoot with everyday – prime and zoom. So get ready and read on!

What’s Inside a Camera Lens

Back in my early days of photography, I never gave much thought to what was inside of a camera lens. I just assumed the lens consisted of a barrel and a piece of curved glass at either end. It wasn’t until later, when I began looking into taking different types of, styles of and higher quality pictures, that I learned the intricacies of what makes a lens. Boy, I was surprised.

Apparently, there’s a lot going on inside there. Lenses aren’t constructed of merely two pieces of glass, but groups of pieces of glass. These groups are called “elements” and their primary goal is to send light, as accurately and cleanly as possible, to the camera’s image sensor. Let me explain.

Let’s say you’d like to construct your own looking lens, which is sort of like a telescope. You decide to use a round tube you found laying around. Since you’ve got curved glass laying around too, you pop one of these pieces of curved glass on the end of your tube. Extremely proud of yourself, you decide to run outside, hold the tube up to your eye and look through it. Much to your dismay, you find the image you see through your tube all distorted. Since you know a bit about how light travels, you decide to run back inside to assemble another piece of curved glass in your tube. You do this, look through the tube again and find the distortion issue has been solved. There’s only one problem – now your image is blurred. To solve this, you add another piece of glass to your tube and there you have it, a clear image. The only problem is…I think you get the idea.

Like I mentioned above, inside a camera lens, there are individual pieces of glass, grouped up and called elements. Some of these individual pieces of glass are placed in the lens barrel to satisfy the reason you purchased it. They magnify, widen, narrow or do anything else someone might want to attach a specific lens to a camera for. The problem is, when these purposeful pieces of glass are used, they cause unintended consequences. And in order to alleviate these consequences, more glass needs to be added offering, hopefully, an end result of affordable, clear and great quality.

Are you curious what types of aberrations various types of glass can cause? Well, you may already be familiar with them. Not all lenses do a great job of curing all issues and oftentimes there’s a trade-off between price, size, weight, quality and what you’re trying to accomplish. But just to satisfy your curiosity, lens aberrations consist of blur, distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration and low contrast. I personally have a telephoto lens that suffers from low contrast and a wide angle lens that suffers from distortion. Again, in order to stay within budget, you often need to make trade-offs when it comes to purchasing camera lenses.

Angle of View & Field of View

Inside every camera, there’s an image sensor. This sensor sits in a specific location. In every camera, there’s also a lens. This lens also sits in a specific location. Now, for the purposes of this example, let’s consider the “lens” I’m referring to as the piece of glass that’s furthest from the image sensor, or in other words, the glass you can touch with your fingers. It’s the one that’s at the end of the lens – not the internal ones.

If the image sensor and lens are one inch apart from one another, the light passing through the lens to the sensor is going to travel through at a specific angle. This angle is called “angle of view.” With the sensor and lens being only one inch apart, the angle of view will be fairly wide.

Now, if we move the lens away from the sensor so the two are now two inches apart, you can imaging what’s going to happen. Since the distance has increased, the angle has decreased, offering a narrower angle of view. Think about zooming in and out on a subject with your camera lens. All the way zoomed out will give you a wide angle of view and zoomed all the way in gives you a narrow angle of view.

Let’s put two and two together here by continuing to talk about the zoom lens I just referred to. If we focus on a subject and zoom all the way out, we can see a lot of stuff. We’re going to have more objects visible to us through our lens. The area we see is called the “field of view.” Field of view is a measurement. If we’re all the way zoomed out, we might be able to see an area that’s one hundred feet wide (in actuality). Now, if we zoom all the way in, the area we can see through the lens shrinks to maybe only be five feet wide. So, it’s logical to conclude that by having a wide angle of view, we get a large field of view and by having a narrow angle of view, we get a small field of view.

Focal Length

There’s a term I purposely left out of the previous section. My intention was to keep things as simple as possible. I know that it gets kind of confusing going through the terminology surrounding camera lenses and by piecing things out, the whole topic is easier to absorb. I am going to introduce something else now, but this one is really simple to grasp.

If you refer back to the previous section, you’ll see that I talked about the distance between the sensor and the lens. What I was referring to is called the “focal length.” In more formal words, the focal length of a lens is the “distance from the optical center of the lens to the camera’s image sensor when the lens is focused on an object at infinity.” Basically, it’s what I said above, just with more words.

Now, if you’ve been interested in photography for any amount of time and have looked into purchasing a lens, you’ve most likely already seen focal lengths in practice. These are the numbers people discuss when they said, “I’ve got a 50mm prime lens.” Folks may also tell you that they’re favorite lens is an 18-135mm zoom lens. In the first example, the focal length is 50mm and in the second example, the focal length ranges from 18mm to 135mm, depending on how far the lens is zoomed in or out.

Image Sensor’s Impact on Field of View

Up until now, everything has been fairly straightforward in this post. I’m going to throw a curve ball at you though. Not because I want to, but because I have to.

I know that I just explained the angle of view and field of view. Things were swell. What if I told you, though, that those two measurements actually depend on your camera’s sensor size? That they aren’t equal across the board? Unfortunately, that’s the truth. Many cameras out there have different size sensors which screws up simplicity when it comes to calculating field of view. I’ll give you a bit of background.

I’m sure you’ve heard of 35mm format film. This is the stuff people used back when I first began toying with photography years and years ago. When using 35mm format film and a 50mm lens, it’s been said that the field of view that stems from this configuration is “normal,” meaning, it’s the typical field of view someone would have when looking at something with their naked eyes.

When talking about digital cameras, those with “full frame” image sensors are those with sensors that are equivalent in size to a piece of 35mm film. So, if you’re shooting with a full frame DSLR camera and are using a 50mm lens, your field of view is normal.

Here’s the thing – not all DSLR cameras have full frame sensors. Many of them have smaller sensors, which are referred to as “cropped.” By this point, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, “Hey, wait a second. If one camera has a smaller sensor than another camera, the first one is going to have a smaller field of view. Even if they both use a 50mm lens.” If you said that, I’d say you are correct.

The way it works is like this – the size of the image sensor dictates the angle of view, which determines the field of view. The larger the sensor, the larger the field of view and the smaller the sensor, the smaller the field of view, all other things being equal. The good new is, when you purchase your camera, it tells you what its “crop factor” is. Crop factor is simply how much smaller your camera’s sensor is than a full frame.

I like to use the Canon T3i camera body. I’ve had this camera for years and I like the way it shoots. The T3i is built with a sensor crop factor of 1.6, meaning it’s got a sensor that’s 1.6 times smaller than a full frame one. If this is the case, when I shoot with a 50mm lens, I don’t have a “normal” field of view. I’ve got a smaller one of them as well.

So, how do I know what my “real” field of view is if I’ve got a cropped sensor? Well, in order to determine this, I’d have to look in my camera’s manual to learn the crop factor. Once I know it, I can simply multiply the crop factor by the focal length and I’ll get my field of view equivalent. Let’s look at the calculation:

50mm lens X 1.6 crop factor = field of view equivalent of an 80mm lens

I know, it’s a bit disappointing because for so many years, I thought I was shooting with a specific focal length, only to learn that I wasn’t. So for all those wide angle shots I bragged about, telling friends and neighbors that I took “really wide” angle pictures at 12mm, I would later have to correct myself and confess that those pictures were actually shot at 19.2mm. Trust me, I didn’t feel nearly as cool after that confession. On the positive side though, I get an extension on the telephoto side. And that’s pretty cool. I just need to keep my sensor size in mind when I’m shooting.

Prime Lenses Versus Zoom Lenses

A few times in this post, I’ve referred to “prime” lenses and “zoom” lenses, but didn’t talk about what exactly the difference is between these two types of lenses. To clear things up, I’ll do so below.

Prime Lenses – This type of lens has a fixed focal length. It can’t be changed. The pros of using this type of lens are that, in general, you can open the aperture more than you can on a zoom lens, letting more light through. This would be considered being “faster” than one with a smaller maximum aperture. Also, these types of lenses offer images with less distortion. The cons are that you can’t adjust the focal length.

Zoom Lenses – With zoom lenses, the focal length changes, based on the photographer’s needs. So, this type of lens is said to have a “variable” focal length. The pros with zoom lenses are that you can adjust the focal length while you are in the field, which offers a nice amount of flexibility. The cons are that they usually weigh more and are sometimes bulky.

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When it comes to photography and your camera, metering modes are fairly simple to understand. And for a good majority of the shots you take, your camera’s default “evaluative” light metering setting will give you great photographs. But, like so many other things in life, there may be circumstances when you might want to fine tune something. Is there too much light in one area of your shot? Too little? Misplaced? Luckily, there’s something you can do to solve odd lighting issues.

In this post, I’m going to talk about what light metering is and what impact the different methods of metering can have on your photographs. I’ll also discuss how exactly you can go about altering the metering setting on your digital camera, as well as offer some photographs that display the effects of the various metering modes in photography.

What Is Metering?

Exposure is a primary pillar in photography. If your camera can’t gauge the amount of light coming through the lens properly, the result will be either under or over exposed photographs. And, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, proper exposure depends on accurately setting the size of the lens’s aperture, the speed of the shutter and the level of the ISO. Here’s the thing – how in the world does your camera know (when using automatic modes) where to place each of those settings? Well, just as luck would have it, there’s something called “metering.”

In photography speak, camera metering, exposure metering or just “metering,” is simply an operation your camera makes in reaction to the amount of light coming through its lens. Every DSLR has a light meter built inside that gauges that light, and based on it, sets the aperture, shutter speed and ISO to an appropriate size, speed and level. If you think about it, it’s sort of like your own eyes. If you walk from a dark room indoors out into the bright sunshine, the light that was once hidden is now exposed. Sensing this, your brain “meters” the light (gauges its level) and makes a determination on what settings your eyes should have, based on the conditions. In the case of this example, your brain may tell your eyes to shrink their irises and your eyelids to blink a few times until the inner workings of your eye can adjust to the influx of light. Your brain is the light meter, the light meter “meters” and your eyes are the aperture, shutter and ISO.

Issues With Metering

Even though our cameras are built using state of the art technology, they aren’t perfect. There are occasions when the default metering setting on our cameras can fail us. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, during the vast majority of photo shoots, the “matrix,” “evaluative,” “honeycomb” or multi-segment” metering modes of a camera can produce outstanding results, but under certain circumstances, that setting can’t keep up.

Have you ever tried to take a photograph where the subject was high in contrast? If so, and if you used the default metering mode on your camera, you may have produced a photograph that was either under or over exposed. The same is true if you photograph a subject that has a back light that’s very bright, such as a person standing on a beach with the sun behind them. Or one where the back light isn’t there at all, such as a photo of the moon. These are all tricky compositions that alternative metering modes would help with.

Metering Modes Explained

Below, I’ll cover the four general metering modes available to modern DSLR cameras. While some of the terminology may vary between manufacturers, the concepts remain constant. Use this post as a guide and when you want to work with the particulars of your own camera, refer to its operation manual.

Multi-area Metering: This metering mode may be referred to as evaluative, matrix, honeycomb or multi-segment, depending on camera brand. While using this mode, your camera analyzes the entire frame and determines what it thinks the proper exposure combination should be. Think of the frame as having a grid superimposed on it. The grid may include approximately 30 – 40 boxes. Inside each box, or section of the grid, your camera calculates an individual exposure setting and when it’s completed calculating, it averages out all of them. From this, the overall exposure is determined. Of course, your camera may weigh the focused on boxes more heavily than those that aren’t focused on, but the result is based on exposure levels from all boxes.

Camera Evaluative Metering Mode Example

Spot Metering: If you’re photographing a subject that occupies only a small area in your entire frame, utilizing spot metering may be the way to go. By using spot metering, you’re effectively telling your camera to limit its light metering to either the very center of the frame or its focus point. And by taking advantage of this setting, you’re essentially having the camera ignore all other areas of the frame. This is an excellent choice for bird lovers, nature photographers, some portraits as well as high contrast photography. With spot metering, the camera bases its calculation on 2-4% of the area of the frame.

Camera Spot Metering Mode Example

Partial Metering: This type of metering is almost identical to spot metering, but with this mode, the camera accumulates data based on 8-13% of the frame as opposed to 2-4% of it. Again, with partial metering, the camera limits its metering to either the very center of the picture area or its focus point.

Camera Partial Metering Mode Example

Center Weighted Metering: The center weighted metering mode is great when you’ve got a subject that’s situated toward the center of the frame and has a background that’s somewhat extreme. Since the camera weights its metering toward the very center, whatever is at the edges of the picture area won’t have a large effect on the light metering. Again, this is helpful in high contrast situations as well as many other types of scenes where you want to put the focus of the lighting on the subject, rather than the entire photo.

Camera Center Weighted Metering Mode Example

How To Change Your Camera Metering Mode

While the sequence of events it takes to change metering modes across the various camera makes and models may vary, the idea is fairly identical. You need to simply identify either the controlling button or the menu setting and pick which mode you’d like to work with. And since I’ve got a Canon T3i sitting in front of me as I write this, I’ll show you how to go about altering the setting on that camera.

Obviously, the first thing you want to do it to turn your camera on. If you’re in one of the priority modes or are in program mode, you should see a display screen that looks like this one below.

Canon T3i Display Screen

If you push the “Menu” button that sits above the display screen and use the left/right arrows over to the right of the display screen, you should be able to navigate across the various menu options. In the case of changing the metering mode, you should choose the second box in from the left. From there, use the up/down arrows to the right of the display screen to navigate to the metering mode option.

Canon T3i Menu Metering Mode

Finally, once inside the metering mode menu, use the left/right arrows to the right of the display screen again to choose between and select which mode you’d like to use. After that, push the “Set” button inside the four arrows to the right of the display screen and you should be ready to go.

Canon T3i Metering Mode Settings

Please note that, as I mentioned above, other cameras have different ways to complete the same task. Some have physical metering mode buttons directly on the camera case, so be sure to read your manual.

Example Photographs Using Different Metering Modes

For this experiment, I went outside and looked for a subject that would be fairly isolated from its background, meaning, something that offered some contrast. I found what I was looking for in a small cluster of flowers. I sat on the ground and set the camera so the flowers were situated in the center of the picture area and I made sure the majority of the background consisted of sky. Even though it’s overcast out there, what I was able to recover shows some nice differentiation between the four metering modes.

The four photographs below were taken using four different metering modes; evaluative metering, partial metering, spot metering and center-weighted average metering. And as you’ll see, the photo that was taken using spot metering came out, by far, the best. The photo taken that used the center-weighted average metering mode looks the darkest and least defined, while the evaluative and partial metering modes look consistent with each other and just average.

Photograph Taken Using Evaluative Metering Mode

Photograph Taken Using Partial Metering Mode

Photograph Taken Using Spot Metering Mode

Photograph Taken Using Center-Weighted Average Metering Mode

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I hope this post helped you learn something about metering modes when it comes to photography. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. If you’d like to check out some more photography tutorials, please take a look at our Photography category by following the link at the top of this page. Also, if you’d like our posts delivered directly to your email inbox after we release them, please sign up for our newsletter.

I’m sure I am not the first person to claim that white balance in photography is often ignored by amateur photographers. In virtually all digital cameras resides an “auto white balance” setting that, when used, will offer great photos 90% of the time. It’s that other 10% that concerns the pros and I’m going to venture out on a limb here when I say, great white balance is what separates the two.

What is White Balance?

When a digital camera takes a photograph, it attempts to “guess” the warmth, or temperature, of the photograph’s ambient lighting, based on what it can understand about the local environment. And as I suggested above, most of the time, the camera is accurate. There are situations, though, when the camera doesn’t know how to, or simply can’t, choose the correct temperature of light because, either there are multiple streams of different types of light surrounding the subject or there isn’t enough light to offer an accurate reading. In these cases, it’s up to the photographer to guide the camera to fulfill his or her intent. The good news is, there’s a multitude of ways to accomplish this.

Why is White Balance Important?

If you discuss photography with very experienced photographers and ask them questions about shooting a variety of subjects, the subject of light is bound to surface. I’ve actually spoken to quite a few who’ve informed me, after I’ve asked them what the enjoy taking photos of the most, that they like capturing the essence of “light.” Light is what touches a subject and gives it its definition and color. Without light, the subject would be invisible. If a camera’s interpretation of the available light’s temperature is mistaken, it can discolor any photo that results from its current setting. The importance of having the correct balance of light can’t be overstated. It’s a critical aspect of photography.

White Balance Presets

Most DSLR cameras offer white balance presents. These are settings that are available to the photographer to simply “override” the camera’s understanding of its available light. By choosing and shooting with a preset white balance setting, you are effectively “telling” the camera what you’d like the resulting picture to look like, even if it’s not correct.

What are the typical white balance presets?

Auto – If you’re looking through your camera’s preset white balance options, this one will be characterized by the AWB symbol. This is the setting you would choose if you’d like your camera to do all the work for you. It will analyze the surrounding light and offer its best interpretation of its temperature so it can match the balance accordingly. While this option works well most of the time, it is prone to error.

Daylight – The camera typically rates this type of light at 5200K. While this is a fairly common lighting situation, you could choose to override the camera’s own auto setting if conditions warrant it. Choose this option if you are shooting is broad daylight.

Shade – Since shade removes some of the sunlight’s warmth, the camera rates this lighting situation at 7000K. If you are shooting in a shady environment, choose this option. The camera will add “warmth” to your resulting photos.

Cloudy – The cloudy preset is similar to shade in that the available light is cooler than full sun. Cloudy light is interpreted by the camera as having a temperature of 6000K and therefore will add warmth to the resulting photos.

Tungsten – If you are shooting in the area of tungsten bulbs (incandescent – generally indoors), you may want to switch to the tungsten preset on your camera. The camera rates this type of atmosphere as being relatively warm, lighting-wise, at 3200K. To balance the photo, the camera will add blue to your resulting photos.

Fluorescent – This type of light has a temperature of approximately 4000K and if shooting indoors under this type of light, you may want to choose this preset. While your resulting photos may not be terribly different than the daylight setting, the camera will add some warmth to the photos.

Flash – This is a popular preset when using flash for photography. Since the camera understands that flash lighting is cool, it will warm the resulting photographs.

Custom – For the best accuracy among the available preset choices, custom white balance may be the best bet. While its operation may vary from camera to camera, the basic idea is the same. In any lighting scenario, you would hold up a white object, such as a piece of paper, and take a photo of it. Then, according to your camera’s operation, you would choose the custom white balance selection. After that, you would choose the photo that includes the white object. The camera would set the white balance with the white object in mind.

I took a few photos this afternoon to exemplify the differences in color the various white balance presets can offer. I think you’ll be just as surprised as I was. For reference, the same subject was photographed under the same light just mere seconds apart. I only paused to change settings. Also, from left to right, the white balance preset settings chosen are auto, daylight, shade, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent and flash. I opted to skip the custom white balance setting for this example because I’ll cover that option below in greater detail.

Differences In Camera White Balance Preset Examples

As you can see for the auto preset, the camera felt as though the lighting was very similar to that of fluorescent light. Those two shots are almost identical. For the others, the camera either warmed the photos up or cooled them down. Just as it’s meant to do. Hopefully, this will give you some insight into how important either choosing the correct white balance preset for or customizing your camera’s white balance truly is.

I’m including the two pages that cover white balance from the Canon T3i owner’s manual below. Again, while camera’s differ from one to another, this should give you a general idea of how to go about choosing a preset white balance and how to manage the custom preset.

Canon T3i Owner's Manual – White Balance – Presets

Canon T3i Owner's Manual – White Balance – Custom

Custom White Balance

In order to obtain the most accurate white balance your camera has to offer in non-raw mode, you can choose the “custom” option from the white balance preset screen. On most cameras, this option is all the way to the right, in relation to the previous choices I described above.

DSLR Camera White Balance Presets

In the above photo of the white balance preset options on my Canon T3i, the custom setting is the one with the two small arrows that face one another.

In order to show you exactly how to take a photo using the custom white balance setting, I went through the process just a few moments ago. I followed the instructions from the owner’s manual. I’ll give the steps below.

1. First, I hung a white piece of paper adjacent to my subject and took a picture of it. According to the instructions, it makes no difference what white balance setting you use for this photo. I decided to go ahead with the auto option.

Custom White Balance Setup

2. Next, I went into the menu of the camera by clicking the “Menu” button and selected “Custom White Balance.” From there, I was given the option to import the photo I had just taken. I agreed in the affirmative and my last picture was imported.

3. After that, I went into the white balance menu by clicking the up arrow that’s marked with the “WB” on the back of the camera and chose the custom selection I referred to earlier.

4. Since my settings were correct, I went ahead and took another picture of my subject. This is the result.

Camera Custom White Balance Preset Example

The color is as accurate as it’s going to get, which remarkably matches what the “auto” option gave me earlier. So, if you’re in a challenging lighting situation and none of the presets are giving you what you’re looking for, go ahead and try the custom option. You’ll likely have good results.

Shooting In Raw Mode

While I’m not going to cover raw shooting in any great detail in this post, I will suggest that in order to obtain the ultimate in your intended photo white balance, shooting raw is the answer. By taking photographs in raw mode, you have the ability to import your image into a raw image editor and adjust the temperature of the color there. There’s a benefit to going about adjusting temperature this way – if you’ve ever overly adjusted color or some other attribute of a photograph in Photoshop, you surely have seen the effects of “over optimizing” an image. Over optimization takes the form of color separation as well as the addition of other artifacts. Needless to say, you don’t want to adjust an image in Photoshop and be left wondering if you went too far because you couldn’t see the extent of the necessary detail on your computer screen. From my history with print, I can tell you that it’s not enjoyable seeing something on paper look awful that looked great digitally.

With raw image editors, over optimization doesn’t occur. Since you are editing a raw file as opposed to a compressed JPG file, the artifacts that are introduced with Photoshop aren’t introduced in this case. You’re left with the ability to edit and adjust as you wish, which is extremely handy when attempting to achieve the highest quality possible.

I’ll be writing an entire post on how to edit white balance in a raw image editor, but for now, I’ll simply mention that if take a picture of a white balance reference card before your shoot, you’ll have the ability of opening that image in the editor and using the dropper tool to take a sample of something “grey” in the image. By doing this, your white balance will automatically adjust itself, which will also be applicable to the rest of your photos from the shoot. It’s an efficient way of setting white balance across a multitude of photos at once. Again, I’ll cover this in another post.

Another way to adjust white balance in a raw image editor is to simply move the temperature slider. While this isn’t optimal for converting a large quantity of images at once, it does offer the ability to visually inspect each photograph as you’re editing.

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In previous posts, where I covered the first two sides of the photography exposure triangle, I talked about aperture and shutter speed. In this post, I’m going to discuss the third side – ISO. In photography, ISO, in the most basic sense, is the camera’s sensitivity to light. ISO settings can generally range between 24 and 6,400, with today’s cameras climbing all the way up to 25,600 or higher. The lower the number, the less sensitive and the higher the number, the more sensitive.

Having the ability to change your ISO setting on the fly is a super flexible tool that hasn’t always been available. If you remember back to the film days of photography, you surely recall purchasing rolls of film with a number on it. It was most likely either ISO 100 or ISO 200. I can remember seeing some with ISO 400. Nevertheless, back then, I had no idea what those numbers meant. I believe folks “in the know” informed me to just buy the ISO 200 and be done with it. That was a good, all around, general film sensitivity for everyday shooting.

Back then, the problem wasn’t purchasing and photographing with a specific ISO as much as it was that you’d have to use that same sensitivity for the entire roll of film. If you wanted to take outdoor shots in bright light and then indoor shots with low light, something had to give. And with the old point and shoot cameras I used to use, it was generally my photos that would suffer. I’m talking about them being either under exposed or over exposed.

Today, much of that headache has disappeared. And throughout the rest of this post, I’ll show you exactly how you can adjust your ISO setting to truly get the most out of your photos.

Benefits of Adjusting ISO With Digital Photography

One of the primary benefits of utilizing various ISO settings on your DSLR camera is that it has the ability to affect shutter speed. Let me give you an example. Say you’re outdoors on a sort of walking tour around town. You’re shooting everything hand held, which requires a shutter speed of at least 1/60 of a second. Since the sun is out and your environment is relatively bright, obtaining this shutter speed isn’t an issue.

Now let’s say that you happen upon a dark alleyway where you discover interesting graffiti art. You’d love to take some photos of it, but once you meter your camera, you find that the shutter speed is set to only 1/30 of a second because of the lack of light. Your current ISO setting is 200. Since you’ve recently been learning about photography, you instinctively increase your ISO setting by one stop (a doubling), which is 400. Now, when you meter your camera, you see that your shutter speed has halved itself (one stop), and is now 1/60 of a second. With this configuration, you can now safely take the photos you’d like with hand held photography.

So what is ISO anyway? What do those different settings do? Well, the way I learned about ISO was like this – compare it to a home stereo. After light hits the sensor inside of a camera, it gets transferred to the internal workings of the camera, or the processor. It’s then output as a photograph. Similarly, when music is fed into a home stereo, it gets processed and is output as sound.

If you increase the ISO setting on a camera, the sensor amplifies the light that’s let through, reducing the amount of light that’s necessary to produce a photo. If you turn up the volume on a home stereo, you amplify the sound that’s being processed, resulting in louder music.

Have you ever really cranked up your stereo, only to hear very loud music intertwined with a hissing noise? The cause of the hiss at those high levels is impure electronics. Nothing is absolutely clean when it comes to this type of thing, so any audible artifacts between transistors and connections results in dirty sound. The same is true in photography. The more you amplify your camera’s sensitivity to light (increase ISO), the more artifacts you’ll see in your resulting photographs. Due to this, the general rule in photography is to keep ISO as low as possible, but as I mentioned earlier in this post, today’s cameras are pushing the envelope when it comes to higher ISO numbers and cameras are now able to produce great looking photos, even at high ISO levels.

Standard ISO Range

For a while now, the standard ISO range on digital cameras has remained between six settings. I’ll list them here:

100
200
400
800
1600
3200

If you take a look at the above ISO range, you’ll notice that each one of them is a doubling of the one before. Each doubling, like shutter speed and aperture size, is considered one “stop.” And just like the other two legs of exposure, one stop is equal to either a halving or doubling of light. To clarify a bit, I’ll give some examples, below, of how ISO settings can impact shutter speed.

ISO 100 – 1/2 second
ISO 200 – 1/4 second
ISO 400 – 1/8 second
ISO 800 – 1/16 second
ISO 1600 – 1/32 second
ISO 3200 – 1/64 second

If you set your camera to each one of the above configurations, your resulting photos should all look the same. Each settings couple lets the same amount of light through to the camera’s processor. As you can well imagine, the relationship between ISO and shutter speed opens up a world of possibility for low light shooting as well as action shots.

Now remember, the reciprocal relationship between ISO and shutter speed doesn’t stop there. Adjusting ISO levels is also effective when attempting to maintain a specific depth of field via aperture size. If you’re goal is to keep a deep depth of field, with a fast shutter speed, during a low light scenario, simply increase ISO. Conversely, if you’re goal is to keep a shallow depth of field with a slow shutter speed in a bright situation, by all means, keep your ISO as low as it’ll go.

Auto ISO

Many cameras today come equipped with a feature called, “Auto ISO.” This is a handy tool that helps out in many situations. Because your camera will likely have an ISO “sweet spot” or a range of acceptably clean exposure, it’s helpful to introduce limits that keep the automatic nature of this feature in check.

If you set your camera to use “Auto ISO,” your camera should choose the minimum ISO necessary for any given lighting situation. This, in turn, should maintain the best image quality possible. Within this feature, a photographer has the ability to set a ceiling for ISO levels, or a limit that their camera can climb. When the maximum ISO is hit in a low light situation, the camera will choose either a slower shutter speed or a larger aperture. Again, this should help with maintaining the highest quality image.

Discovering Your Camera’s ISO Quality Limit

Every situation where an ISO adjustment may be necessary will be different. Therefore, it’s important to experiment with your camera to find the point at which photographs begin to degrade because of excessive noise. If you remember from above, if you raise your camera’s ISO level too high, noise will creep into your images and perhaps make them unusable.

I recently set my personal Canon T3i up on a table top tripod and took photos of a few items that are set up on a cabinet. I took one picture for each ISO setting on the camera. The T3i’s ISO range lies between 100 and 6400. I then put the images into Photoshop to merge them together as a fairly clear example of how an increase in ISO can affect image quality. I’ll display the image below. To see a larger version, simply click the image.

As you scroll down the image, you should see some quality consistency between the 100, 200 and 400 ISO levels. At ISO 800 and 1600, some noise becomes evident. In the last two shots, ISO 3200 and 6400, noise is clearly visible. For my purposes, primarily using photography for the web, I wouldn’t use an ISO setting higher than 800 when the lighting conditions are near what the lighting conditions were during the time of this experiment. Personally, I would record these results, as well as experiment with other light levels while taking the same types of photos. I would record those results as well, so I have a better idea of my camera’s limits when I’m in the field.

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The most popular aspect of shooting in aperture priority mode on your DSLR camera is the ability to control your photo’s depth of field. For those of you who aren’t versed in photographer lingo, depth of field is the plane of focus in a picture. In other words, in any given photograph, it’s possible to have particular aspects of it that are in focus as well as those that are out of focus. You may have seen this type of photography prevalent in macro shots. Portrait photographers are also notorious for taking advantage of a shallower depth of field, causing the subject to remain clear and isolated, while the background blurs out. Conversely, landscape photographers prefer a deeper depth of field, which keeps the entire photo in focus.

In my previous photography post, I talked about shutter speed and how it affects exposure. Well, aperture size also affects exposure, but just in a different way. And as you become more versed in the sport of photography, you’ll begin to learn how the two can play off one another.

In this post, I’m going to discuss aperture – what it is, how to use it while taking photos and what affects it can have on your photography as far as lighting and depth of field are concerned.

Measuring Aperture

It’s common knowledge that aperture is one of the more confusing areas of learning basic photography. It doesn’t have to be though. If you simply section out the elements of what aperture is, how to measure it and its effects on depth of field, it should become straightforward.

First, I’ll discuss what aperture is. This one’s easy.

Basically, aperture is the size of the hole in the camera’s lens that lets light through. The hole is created by sliding metal fins that move against each other as the photographer chooses and sets the desired aperture size. It’s helpful to compare a lens’s aperture to the iris of an eye – the mechanism that shrinks and contracts, depending on how much light is needed. More mechanically, you can compare aperture to a flower in a garden. During the day, the flower petals open up and during the night, they close. Think of the metal fins inside the lens as the flower petals.

Next, I’ll cover how to measure aperture.

Aperture is measured using an “f-stop” scale. Each “stop” is denoted by a number. It looks like this: f/number. Just switch out the word “number” with an actual number. If you take a look below, you’ll see the f-stop scale in all its glory.

f/1.4
f/2
f/2.8
f/4
f/5.6
f/8
f/11
f/16
f/22

There are a few interesting areas to note regarding the above scale. The first area that requires understanding is that the smaller the number, the larger the actual aperture opening in the lens. The larger the number, the smaller the opening. We’ll keep things simple by considering each f-stop as a fraction. So if we think of a fraction, we know that 1/2 is larger than 1/1000. If you keep this in mind, it’ll be much easier to think straight while you’re in the field.

The next area that requires understanding is that in the above scale, each “stop” is a halving or doubling of light that hits the camera’s sensor. So, while the numbers aren’t exactly halves or doubles of each other, the size of the aperture is. I talked about stops and light in my previous post where I covered shutter speed. Just as shutter speed uses stops as a measurement, so does aperture.

If you’re looking at your digital camera right now and seeing a larger quantity of aperture sizes, don’t worry. Many cameras today display selections as third-stops, meaning there are stops in between those in the traditional aperture scale.

Finally, I’m going to talk about what effect aperture size has on depth of field. Later on in this post, I’ll go much deeper into the definition of depth of field, but for right now, we’ll keep things easy.

If you were holding a camera in your hand right now and dialing the aperture size down to the lowest available setting, you’d be increasing the size of the aperture. By “opening up” the aperture, you’d be narrowing the depth of field. All this means is that the plane of focus is getting thinner. So, if your aperture is large enough and you were taking a photo of someone’s face, the front part of their face may be in focus and the back of their head, perhaps their hair, might show some blur.

Conversely, if you dialed the aperture size up to the highest setting, you’d be decreasing the size of the aperture. By “closing” the aperture, you’d be deepening the depth of field. In this case, the plane of focus is getting much wider. This type of aperture size is great for landscape shots, where the entire area is the subject and everything needs to be in focus.

Using Aperture Priority

In a previous post, I discussed shutter priority mode. One benefit of using shutter priority is that you have control over how much light hits the camera’s sensor. Another benefit – a more creative one – is that you can control the motion blur, or clarity that’s in your photos.

Aperture priority is similar to shutter priority in that you have control over certain aspects of your photos as well. Like shutter priority, you can dial in exactly how much light hits the sensor. But unlike shutter priority, with aperture priority, you can adjust depth of field, or focal blur that’s in your photos. And that’s what I’ll be talking about in this section.

As I mentioned above, depth of field is a range of focus. It measures how much of the image is in focus, from front to back. I’m going to give you a few examples to help make this concept a bit more clear.

Let’s say you are taking a photo of three people. They are all standing in front of you in a staggered fashion. The first person is about 5 feet away, the second person is about 10 feet away and the third person is about 15 feet away.

The first photo you take of these people will be taken with an aperture setting of f/2.8, which will give you an extremely shallow, or narrow, depth of field. Now, just to let you know, depth of field is measured from the point of focus. So if you’re focusing on the person in the middle (the one who’s 10 feet away), only that person will be in focus. The front person and the rear person will both be blurry. If you decide to focus on either one of those other folks, the remaining two will be blurry. This is because the depth of field with an aperture setting of 2.8 is only a few feet.

Now, as a reminder – if you focus on the first person in our lineup, as I mentioned before, they will be in focus. The person behind them will be blurry and the person behind them will be really blurry. Depth of field has a range that increases with distance.

Let’s change things up a bit. Let’s say that you want to remove some of the blur from the front person and the rear person when you focus on the center person. To do this, you can dial down the aperture size (so the aperture hole is smaller) to something like f/11. By doing this, you’ll be widening, or deepening, the depth of field, which will clear up some of the blur from the two people I referred to earlier. Now, these folks will still be blurry in the same fashion as they were in the first example, but it won’t be as dramatic. I’ve personally taken photos like this and the risk I’ve run into is that the photo looks like it was taken in error. While the center subject was perfectly clear, the remaining two subjects weren’t exactly in focus or out of focus. It looked like I didn’t know how to set the camera properly because there wasn’t much definition. Just a word of caution.

Lastly, let’s say that you wanted to take a picture where everyone was in focus. You can do this by truly deepening the depth of field as much as your lens will let you. If you set the aperture to something like f/22, when you take the photo, all three people will be in focus. That’s because the depth of field will be so great, or deep, your camera and lens will capture everything.

As you can see, by toying with aperture settings, and as a result, the depth of field, we can add creativity to our photos and truly guide the viewer’s eye.

What is Lens Speed?

For years, as I was learning about photography, I would hear about something called “lens speed.” I never really looked into its meaning, which I think hurt me because while reading all those Amazon.com reviews on lenses I thought I was interested in, I didn’t really have an idea of what the reviewers were referring to when they described the speed of the lens in question. As time passed, I decided to look into the meaning of what I’m talking about here and I thought I’d share it with you.

Lens speed refers to the size of the available aperture of a particular lens. As you may already know, all lenses aren’t created equally. Some have set apertures, some have apertures that only move within a narrow range and some have apertures that move within a wide range. Some lenses offer aperture sizes that hang out near the low side with large openings and some offer just the opposite with small openings. With all these variations, it’s sort of challenging to “talk photography” with people without some sort of a rule. I’ll give that rule to you right now:

Fast Lens Speed – These are lenses that offer low aperture f-numbers and wide apertures. These lenses let more light through and are referred to as “fast” lenses.

Slow Lens Speed – These are lenses that offer high aperture f-numbers and narrow apertures. These lenses restrict the light that passes through and are referred to as “slow” lenses.

Now, there’s a whole lot to discuss when it comes to lenses and all their respective attributes. Much too much to go over in this post. Keep an eye out though, because I’ll be writing about lenses in future posts.

Small Aperture For Landscape Photography

Many amateur photographers like to head outside in search of the ultimate landscape shot. They set their camera to “auto,” find what they want to capture and snap away. While many of their pictures will be winners, they might be winners by luck.

What I mean is this – when shooting in auto mode, a photographer doesn’t have much say when it comes to following some of the guiding principles of photography. Oftentimes, cameras set their internals up to offer the best exposure. They don’t necessarily set things up with the photographer’s intent or creativity in mind. Because of this, a photographer, amateur or otherwise, needs to take back control from their camera.

If you recall what I wrote above, you know that if you want a very deep depth of field, you should use a smaller aperture size. Shooting landscape would be a prime example of this type of setting. In general, “land” in a landscape is the subject, so you’d want as much as possible to be in focus, from front to back. Unfortunately, even with a very high aperture number, you won’t be able to grab everything and have it in focus.

What to do? Well, the first thing you should do is find out the furthest you can push your aperture size. What I mean is, even if your lens’s aperture can close almost all the way down, you might not want to do that. If you do, and the conditions are not optimal for that setting, the quality of your photographs may suffer. Folks in the business call this the lens’s “sweet spot.” It’s where you can set your lens to give you the best output. Now, you have to understand, while taking landscape photographs, the sweet spot most likely won’t lie at f/22. It’s likely going to be somewhere much more moderate. So with that in mind, you’ll need to compensate with other guiding principles.

When taking landscape photos, the primary aspect you need to concern yourself with is what you want to focus on. As I mentioned directly above and in other prior sections, you won’t be able to have everything in focus, meaning, your depth of field will be finite. In order to deal with this, you’ll need to determine how deep your depth of field is and what your primary subject is going to be. Even in landscape, you’ll surely need to prioritize something.

As a general rule, when taking landscape photos, you want to focus on what’s one third of the entire landscape away. I know, that’s a bit to digest. Let me say this another way – say your camera is sitting on a tripod that’s pointing towards a mountain. Your tripod is at mile number zero. You are the beginning of the scene. Now let’s say that the horizon of the mountain is nine miles away. So, we can say that the subject of the photograph is nine miles deep.

In order for us to take a nice looking photo with a decent variety of clarity and focus blur, we should focus on the three mile mark. That will allow our camera’s depth of field to give us clarity in the foreground of the photo and slowly blur, probably beginning at the six mile mark or something like that, all the way back.

Here’s the issue though. What if we focus on the three mile mark, but that’s not where we want to point the camera? What if that excludes some of the scene? That’s easy to fix. When you auto-focus on something with your DSLR camera, you can push the shutter button down half way, in order to allow the camera to focus and meter. If you don’t let up and keep the shutter button half way pushed down, you can move the camera anywhere you want. When you have the scene you desire in the viewfinder, go ahead and continue to push the button down all the way to take the picture. This should give you your desired results.

Because it’s difficult to see exactly what you’ve got in focus while in the field, it helps to take advantage of a technique called bracketing. Bracketing, and in this case, depth of field bracketing, means that you take several shots, each using a slightly different setting. If we were taking a picture of a landscape and wanted to focus on something in particular, but weren’t sure if we were getting the shot we want, we could continually adjust the focus, from the foreground to the background, in hopes that one or two of them are what we’re after. Photography isn’t an exact science and since digital film is free, we should use it extensively.

Zooming In For Close-up Photography

One of my favorite types of photography is macro. I love to get really close to a subject, take a few pictures and then review them inside on my computer. It wasn’t long after I began taking these types of photos that I realized something odd was happening when I’d position my camera, take a picture, re-position the camera, take another photo and so forth. For each shot, the depth of field would change dramatically – even when I hadn’t changed the aperture setting.

It’s common knowledge, and I’ve talked about this above, that the wider the aperture in a lens, the shallower the depth of field. What’s not so common knowledge is that depth of field can also change based on the camera’s proximity to the subject. Well, actually, the depth of field can seem like it’s changing based on the camera’s proximity to the subject.

If you take a picture of someone who is standing in a field in front of a forest using an f/8 aperture, you’ll get a photo with the subject that’s clear and a background that’s soft. Now, if you physically move your camera back about ten or twenty feet and zoom in on the person, so they fill the frame as they did earlier, while keeping the same f/8 aperture, the subject will remain clear, but the background will appear softer than it did in the previous shot.

You’re probably asking, “How can this be?” What’s going on is an interesting phenomenon. While the background isn’t really any softer, it appears larger, or close, and therefore appears softer.

To make this easier to understand, think about taking a photograph with a wide angle lens. If you’ve ever done this, you know that you can essentially be on top of something, take a picture of it, and it’ll appear as though that something is ten feet away. That’s the fun part of using a wide angle lens. You can use it for some really neat tricks. Now, if you use a zoom lens or a magnifying filter at the end of a lens, exactly the opposite will happen. Things will appear very close to you.

While I’m not going to get into the deep specifics of what’s going on behind the scenes in this post, I will tell you that with various lenses, objects in the photographs will appear as though they are either closer or further away from one another, with no apparent changes in settings between lenses. It simply depends on the relationship of the lens glass between each other.

DOF Preview

One of the most critical areas of taking photographs in the field is awareness. You need to be aware of, not only what’s going on around you, but also what’s going on inside your camera. And just because you set your aperture to a particular size, doesn’t mean that you’re going to get what you expect. There are various factors that can affect depth of field in a photo, as I just mentioned above, and those factors need to be addressed as to minimize surprises during photo editing.

The tool of choice to test aperture is called the depth of field preview button. Usually, it’s a small, unmarked button on the left side of the camera (if you’re looking through the viewfinder) and it resides right next to the lens. What the button does, when pressed, is offer the photographer a simulated representation of what the photograph will look like when taken. To see the simulated representation, you’ll need to look through the viewfinder.

When taking photos, your camera always keeps the aperture at its widest setting to allow as much light through as possible. It does this to aid the photographer while they are trying to set up a shot. It’s not only until the photographer meters the camera by pushing the shutter button down half way that the camera actually sets the correct aperture for the picture. So when looking through the viewfinder when the camera isn’t metered, it’s impossible for someone to grasp what the depth of field output will look like.

By pushing the depth of field preview button, the camera acts as if you push the shutter button down half way. It sets the aperture to give you a view of things to come.

How Wide Can You Go?

I absolutely love pushing my lens to the limit when it comes to shooting shallow depth of field. It creates a lot of drama for my macro shots and really isolates my subjects when taking shots that are further away. I have run into issues when opening up my aperture too much though and I’ll share a few of those issues here.

First, when I open up my lens as far as it’ll go, things get really tough to photograph. Oftentimes, when I shoot macro, the depth of field is so narrow that what’s clear for one inch will blur a half inch closer or further away. If I don’t have the camera stabilized, I’m almost certain to take a blurry photo throughout. But, this type of shallow depth of field makes for great photos, so fool around with it a bit to see what you can do.

Next, by opening up a lens all the way, you become susceptible to the altering of background images. While both backgrounds will most likely be blurry while shooting at f/2/8 and f/4, both backgrounds might not display the shapes of what appears in them identically. Some shapes may be higher or wider than they would be at a different aperture, so this is something to keep in mind as well.

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A common goal of photographers far and wide is to take clear photos. Of course, there are occasions when someone might want to introduce blur into a picture, but for the most part, when an object is focused on, the primary objective is to return a photo with suitable clarity. Many times though, situations arise where photos don’t have their sought after quality. The first place any experienced photographer turns to is shutter speed.

In this post, I’m going to discuss how shutter speed works on DSLR cameras and how to best achieve the results you want when you’re indoors or in the field shooting photos. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, but there are fundamentals that must be understood.

Camera Shake Vs. Slow Shutter Speed Vs. Lack of Focus

Before we begin, I think it would be prudent to define the difference between a few types of blur. In general, there are three types of blurry photographs. They are lack of focus, camera shake and motion blur.

Lack of Focus: If you take a picture and what you intend to focus on is blurry, but the rest of the photo is clear, you are most likely suffering from a focus error, or lack of focus. You can pinpoint this error by looking around the photo that was taken. If the background, for instance, is clear, with no motion blur at all, but the foreground has a soft, uniform blur to it, lack of focus is what you’ve got. To remedy this, you’ll need to look into either your camera’s auto-focus or your manual focus methodology. The key to diagnosing this type of photograph is to look at the type of blur. Like I mentioned above, if it’s uniform and soft, with no start or end point, it’s most likely lack of focus.

Camera Shake: While looking at a photo, if you notice that all items in it exhibit a sort of movement blur, you are most likely suffering from camera shake. Camera shake is oftentimes attributed to a slower than optimal shutter speed and an unsteady hand. If a shutter speed is slow and either you or the camera is moving, the result will be an all around blurry photo that looks like it’s been shaken. To remedy this, you’ll need to increase the camera’s shutter speed or steady the camera or both.

Motion Blur: If you take a picture and notice that a moving object in it has a motion blur, while all other objects in it are clear, you are most likely suffering from a slow shutter speed. Conversely, if you’ve taken a picture of a moving object and it’s clear, while everything else has a motion blur, you’ve taken the photograph correctly. The second scenario is called proper panning and will be discussed in another post. For now, what you need to understand is to take pictures of moving objects, you either need to increase the camera’s shutter speed to such a degree that everything in the photo is clear or to pan the camera as to remain focused on the moving object.

Is Your Shutter Speed Too Slow?

One of the most overlooked settings on any DSLR today is shutter speed. Many amateur photographers prefer to let their cameras do the work by overusing the “P” (program) mode or one of the other automatic settings. This can lead to trouble because cameras don’t always know the photographer’s intent. I’ll give you can example.

Oftentimes, I like to head outside during early spring to take photos of freshly budding flowers. Since spring is the only time of year the flowers I like to shoot are in this state, my time is very limited. If the sun is shining or if it’s not raining, I have to get out there, even if it’s windy. And trust me, much of the time it’s windy.

Problems arise when I try to take pictures of flowers that are swaying back and forth because of the wind. If I choose to use program mode on my camera, the camera is taking notice of the light that’s available – and that’s it – and programming what it thinks the settings should be. It has no idea that my subject is moving. If it’s cloudy or dark outside, for one reason or another, I’m essentially trying to take an action shot. The camera will automatically set the shutter speed to a relatively slow one because of the lack of light. If you’ve ever tried to capture a moving object with a slow shutter speed, you know that the resulting photo will be blurry. That’s why there is a very important rule in photography:

Always take note of your shutter speed. For every single shot.

Now, you may be asking, what should my shutter speed look like to handle various conditions? Luckily, I wrote a post, earlier, that covers what various shutter speeds should be set to, based on what you’re attempting to capture. I’ll give you a general tip to follow here though. If you’re hand holding your camera and using a shutter speed that’s slower than 1/60 of a second, your resulting photographs may be blurry. Of course, there’s more that goes into this, but you can safely use this speed as a guide. It’s better to keep an eye on and adjust the shutter speed than to take blurry photos caused by camera shake.

By this point, you may have another question. How do we reduce camera shake? Again, I wrote posts on how to properly hold a camera and how to stabilize a camera as to reduce blur. If you don’t have time to read those other posts right now, I’ll give you a few options here.

1. Don’t take the photo.

2. Stabilize your hand held camera by holding it properly and tight to your body.

3. Stabilize your camera by leaning it against a stable object.

4. Stabilize your camera by using a tripod.

The primary take away for this section is that you begin to focus on shutter speed and consider it one of the most important settings on your camera.

What is a Stop?

A stop, in the most basic sense, can be defined as the opening that lets light through your camera lens. I talked about this in a previous post, where I discussed aperture. The aperture, in a lens, is a set of metal fins that slide along each other to increase or decrease the size of the opening in a lens that allows light in. It’s much like the iris in a human eye. The larger the hole, the more light passes through. The smaller the hole, the less light.

To many photographers though, a “stop” is merely a measure of light. It needn’t be related to only aperture. A stop can be measured by any source of light that’s available for a scene.

For instance, let’s say that you’ve got a setting where there’s one source of light. If you double the amount of light available from what you initially had, you’d be increasing it by “one stop.” The same is true if you cut your light source in half. If you did this, you’d be decreasing your light source by one stop.

If you discuss stops as related to the amount of light that’s allowed to pass through your camera’s lens, you’d be referring to the size of your lens’s aperture and your camera’s shutter speed. For example, if you set your camera’s shutter speed to 1 second and then halved it to 1/2 second, you’d be reducing the sensor’s availability to light by one stop. Similarly, if you increase or decrease your aperture size by double or half, you’d be increasing it or decreasing it by one stop.

Let’s go through a real world example for a moment. Let’s say you have four equal light sources for an indoor shoot. When you focus your camera on your subject and meter it, the camera tells you the shutter speed is set to 1/500 of a second (fast). If you turn off two of your sources of light and then meter your camera again, it should tell you that the shutter speed is set to 1/250 of a second (slower). The reason the shutter speed decreased by half is because your light source was reduced by half. In photographer speak, your light source was reduced by one stop (less light), so your shutter speed was increased by one stop (light passes through longer).

So to review, a “stop” is a relative measure of light. To increase lighting by one stop, you double your light source or slow your shutter speed by half. To decrease lighting by one stop, you half your light source or double your shutter speed.

Working With Shutter Priority

When you set your camera to shutter priority, you are most likely after one of two things. You either want to take an action photo that’s ultra still and clear or you want to take an action photo that’s got some blur to it. Shutter priority is great at handling both of these types of photos, but in order to take advantage of this setting, you’ll need to know what’s happening inside your camera and lens when you are using it.

Most DSLR cameras have a dial at the top of it with some letters marked all around it. To turn on shutter priority, turn the dial until the “S” (Nikon and Sony) or “Tv” (Canon) is lined up with the small tick mark. Once you do this, you’ll be in shutter priority and will be able to adjust the shutter speed at will. For assistance with this while using your specific camera, please refer to your manual.

If you’re new to cameras or are studying further into the hobby or profession, you’ve probably heard folks telling you to get away from automatic mode. The reason they tell you this is because when you’re in one of the auto modes, all your camera is doing is attempting to meter based on the available light around you. It doesn’t know what your intentions are as far as adding or eliminating blur from your photos. I’ve dealt with this on many occasions while taking my spring time flower photos. For the types of pictures I was referring to in one of the previous sections in this post, shutter priority is a perfect solution.

The great thing about taking advantage of shutter priority mode is that when used, your camera is still in a sort of an auto mode. The only area you’re taking control of is how fast the shutter curtain slides across the camera’s sensor. When you choose a shutter speed, your camera will decide on an appropriate aperture value as well as an ISO value based on the available light in your setting. With this in mind, you’ll have the freedom to make time stand still, add movement to your photos or pan to your heart’s content.

I have a word of warning, though, when using shutter priority. If you decide to use a very slow or a very fast shutter speed, your lens may not have a compatible aperture setting to allow or restrict the light making it through to the camera’s sensor. For instance, if you want to really crank up your shutter speed and set it to 1/4000 of a second for the most clear and still of shots, your camera lens’s aperture might not open large enough to let the light your camera’s sensor needs in. And if you continue to take the photo, there’s a good chance it will turn out underexposed. The same is true for the opposite. If you slow down your shutter speed to such a degree, your aperture might not close far enough to block the light in your setting, which may result in an overexposed photo.

Reciprocity Between Shutter Speed & Aperture

The relationship between shutter speed and aperture is fairly simple to comprehend. It’s sort of like algebra – when something happens to one side, the opposite must happen to the other side. In photography, while in shutter priority mode, if you set your shutter speed to 1/250 of a second, your camera may set the lens aperture to f/8, based on how much light is available. If you then slow your shutter speed by half (one stop), your camera will most likely shrink the lens aperture by one stop, or to f/11. Basically, when you’re shooting in shutter priority mode, your camera will always try to balance out the light that hits the sensor by appropriately adjusting the size of the aperture. This is called, “reciprocity.”

Reciprocity is the law of the relationship between shutter speed and aperture size. The law tells us that a halving or doubling in shutter speed is equivalent to a one stop change in aperture. Each change either increases or decreases light by one comparable stop.

How To Control Motion With Camera Shutter Speed

When considering shutter speed, it’s helpful to think about your camera freezing a specific duration of time. If your shutter speed is very fast, the duration of time you capture will be very “tight” or small. In general, the time you capture with a shutter speed above 1/250 of a second will be clear, with very little blur. Conversely, if you set your camera to use a slower shutter speed, it’ll be capturing a longer duration of time. If you’re shooting action or movement, chances are, your photograph will exhibit blur.

Have you ever wondered how photographers take those pictures of, let’s say, waterfalls, where the water is either frozen very clearly in time or moving as smooth as silk? To take both of those types of photos, they manipulate shutter speed.

Here’s a real world example. Let’s say someone wants to go out and visit their favorite waterfall on a sunny day. They can get fairly close to the falling water, so if they wanted to (which they do), they could take a photo of each and every water droplet so they display clearly and very still in their photograph. How would they do this?

Well, on a sunny day, the camera’s shutter speed will do a fairly good job of capturing the falling water at 1/250 of a second in shutter priority. There will be very little blur or movement. If the photographer bumps the shutter speed up to 1/1000 of a second, the falling water will be that much more clear. It will look as though it’s frozen in time with virtually no movement at all. Just a reminder – as I mentioned above, when dealing with an extremely fast shutter speed, be sure your lens’s aperture can handle it. Either that, or use your exposure compensation or ISO to deal with the relatively little light allowed to touch your camera’s sensor.

If that someone wasn’t interested at capturing still water and was more interested in taking one of those really cool moving, flowing, silky waterfall shots, they would have to set their shutter to a much slower speed. Even if they set the shutter to 1/30 of a second, that most likely wouldn’t capture the effect they’re looking for. Remember, the goal is flowing movement of the water in a stationary environment. And for this type of photography, a tripod is definitely necessary.

If the photographer adjusts the shutter speed to something slower, such as 1/20 or 1/15 of a second, the water will flow much more in the photo.

List of Shutter Speed Increments

If you recall, I talked about shutter speed increments in one of my previous posts. In that post, I told you, in a general sense, what a particular range of shutter speed might be useful for. In the final section of this post, I’m going to discuss shutter speed increments one more time, but from a different angle.

I’m going to list the common shutter speed increments found on mostly all DSLR cameras. They are:

1/15
1/30
1/60
1/125
1/250
1/500
1/1000
1/2000
1/4000

Do you notice anything interesting about the above speeds? Well, if you’re good at math, you can most likely tell that each shutter speed (except for one) is a doubling or halving of the one before or after. Pulling from a previous section of this post, each of these increments would be considered a “stop (or step).”

Now, if you’re scratching your head because your digital camera has many more available shutter speeds than what I’ve listed above, you’re not going crazy. The additional shutter speeds are considered 1/3 or 1/2 stops. And by having these available stops, your creative control increases.

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