Well when we think about exposure a lot of the times we think about images being too bright or too dark but there's more to it than that, we can have images that are noisy or images that are blurry are really nice and crisp, or images they have lots of stuff in focus or just the one thing that and focus or maybe its totally out of focus altogether and the exposure triangle helps us understand how all of that works together and the exposure triangle is made of three things and these three things never change so once you have these down you're going to be good to go forever so don't fret it's very, very simple.
In the exposure triangle we have the aperture, the shutter, and ISO and the three things work together to give us a perfect exposure. I want to start to explain this by looking at the aperture, now the aperture is inside your camera lens, in fact if I take this lens off my camera and we can look at this really close, I can move this in and out and you can see clearly that the aperture is just this thing that let's light, more light in or less light in, its growing and shrinking. So our aperture is in our lands and I can make it really big or really small by just changing aperture value. Now our aperture values have numbers like f/22, f/16, f/11, f/8 and the smaller the number the larger the opening, and the larger the number the smaller the opening, I know that seems backwards but that's how it is, f/16 is really small f/is really big now it's not important that you know what those numbers mean right now, we're going to explain that in a future episode right now it's important to understand that a big number means a small opening and a small number means a big opening, I guarantee we're going to make that make sense free in a future episode, but just remember a big opening means lots of light is coming through and the small opening means not very much light is coming through so we've got a big number not very much light because its a small hole, a small number means a lot to light is coming through because it's a big opening.
Our aperture controls the quantity of light coming into our camera so that little thing in our lens it can be open or closed, its letting a different quantity of light come into our camera. Well there's another thing in our camera, everyone already I'm sure knows about this, it's called the shutter. Now the shutter can go at a really fast speed, in fact we'll look at this there's the shutter, BAM, when I turn on my camera it goes wham really, really fast or I can slow that down that was at about 4,000th of a second, I can do all way down to 500th of a second even down to a 30th of a second, and I can get a lot slower, half a second, one second all the way down to 30 seconds, even a few minutes, so just like the aperture where it allows lots of light and not very much light, the shutter does sort of the same thing, with the really fast shutter, not very much light is coming into our camera, a really slow shutter, lots of light is coming into our camera.
So we've got these two things the aperture that can let in lots of light or not very much light, and the shutter that can let in lots of light or not very much light and those two things have to be balanced on sort of like a scale, so if this on is letting in a lot of light well then this one needs to restrict so we don't get too much light, or of this one is letting in not very much light we need open this one up so we get more light, so there's always a play in those two things trying to figure out how much light to come in and we're want to talk about how our camera figures that out in a little bit. The third thing in our exposure triangle is called ISO, an ISO controls the sensitivity of our camera to light. Now there's more to it than that and a lot of those really geeky guys that know lots of science are always going to post a comment and say no it's about gain and all this stuff, but it's really easy to remember our ISO controls how sensitive our camera is to light much like our eyes in a dark theater, when we go into a dark theater at first we can't really see, but as our eyes adjust to the darkness then we can see just fine we can, but we can't see as well as we can in bright daylight.
The same thing is true of ISO, when you have a low ISO number like 100 or 200 our camera isn't very sensitive to light and so we have to either open up our aperture really wide or make a slow shutter speed or have to be a really bright area, a really bright day and as we increase our ISO our camera becomes more and more sensitive to light the problem is we also get noise in our images so there is a penalty for having a high ISO. So we have those three things, the aperture more and less light, the shutter more and less light, and the ISO more and less sensitive to light which is sort of the same thing as more or less light. Getting those three things in balance we have something that's built into almost every modern camera and that's called a meter. Now think about the meter sort of as a judge, the meter is looking at the settings of our cameras and saying hey if you set the aperture to this wide I've got to figure out how fast the shutter speed should be, or if you set the shutter speed in this fast I've got to figure out how big or small the aperture should be, so the meter is judging things for us and something thats very important to note just because two settings work, or three settings work in one situation doesn't mean it'll work in a different situation because light is constantly changing and that's why we need a meter in our camera.
Alright lets put all of this stuff together, now that we know about the three things ISO aperture and shutter and the judge or the meter that's built into our camera, how does all on this work? Well it's pretty simple, normally on the exposure triangle you set two things and our camera figures out the third using its meter so you'll set either the ISO and the aperture and the camera will figure out the correct shutter speed or you'll set the ISO and shutter speed and the camera will figure out the correct aperture value and it does that using the built-in light meter.
Now the question you're asking me is, well which one do I start with, do I set the aperture or should I set the shutter? Well it really depends on the kind of photographer that you are, traditionally scenic photographers and portrait photographers are more concerned with the aperture than they are with the shutter and the reason for that is the aperture helps us control how much of an image is in focus and scenic photographers want everything in focus, from the front to the very end so they want a small aperture value and the shutter can do whatever it wants to do because the camera is on a tripod, and portrait photographers want sort of the opposite of that.
They want a nice clear image if somebody's face but they want the background to fall out of focus and the aperture helps us do that so scenic photographers and portrait photographers care about the aperture, while the people that deal with motion, specifically sports photographers they care about the shutter because the shutter controls motion it either freezes motion or shows motion because the shutter controls the the duration of time, how long light comes into a camera, so if you want to shoot somebody dunking a basketball or a race car or a bicycle going by you care about your shutter speed and the aperture can do whatever it wants to do and you're probably still going to be happy.
Thats the beginning point we're going to delve into both of those things in future episodes in fact we're going to delve into all of this over a series of episodes, the next episode we're going to talk about depth of field in the aperture and all the things that it does and how the aperture affects your lens choices so you'll learn how to buy the proper lens for your needs, then we're going to talk about the shutter speeds, we're going to understand stops, how everything works together we're going to understand metering, we're going to talk about how the camera meters light and sometimes it gets it wrong, and we're going to tell you how to get it right every single time.
I'm going to tell you how to shoot in manual mode using the exposure triangle and a lot more so stick with us, we have a lot to come in Exploring Photography over the few episodes. Well thanks for joining me for this episode of Exploring Photography and don't forget everything that I'm talking about today you can read more about that at the Adorama Learning Center, its absolutely free so check that out and AdoramaTV is absolutely free so click the subscribe button because I know you don't want to miss a single episode. Thanks for joining me this week and I'll see you again next time! Do you want great-looking prints at low-cost? Be sure to visit our easy to use, online printing service.
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