Exposure .::. CharlestonImage.com - Fine Art Photography

Exposure is the amount of light collected by the sensor in your camera during a single picture. If the shot is exposed too long the photograph will be washed out. If the shot is exposed too short the photograph will appear too dark. Almost all cameras today have light meters which measure the light in the given shot and set an ideal exposure automatically. Most people depend on the light meter which is fine, but if you know how to control your exposures you can get some creative and sometimes better pictures.

The two primary controls your camera uses for exposure are shutter speed (the amount of time the sensor is exposed to light) and aperture (the size of the lens opening that lets light into the camera). Shutter speeds are measured in seconds and more commonly fractions of a second. (1/2000 of a second is very fast and 8' seconds is extremely slow). Apertures are measured in something called f/stops (a very wide aperture is f/2.8 and a very small aperture is f/19).

A photograph that has control over the depth of field can add dramatically to the impact of it. When talking about depth of field, I'm referring to a shot were the main subject of the photograph is sharp but other elements are blurred or out of focus. Two key terms to learn here are focal plane, the area of the image that we want to have in sharp focus, and bokeh, which is the out of focus sections.

If you can master controlling the depth of field in your photographs you will be taking your photographs to a whole new level. What do I mean by controlling depth of field (DoF)? This is the effect where the subject is in sharp focus but the rest of the image is slightly out of focus. The effect is referred to as bokeh. The more bokeh, the more dramatic the blurring effect. In this article, I will discuss how to control the amount of bokeh in your images.

Being able to control the depth of field is not very easy on lower end cameras, as you need to be able to shoot in either an aperture priority mode or in a full manual mode. If you have a fully automatic point and shoot then you will not be able to achieve the effect you want.

The setting you need to be able to adjust is the aperture setting, the larger the aperture (the smaller the number) the shorter the focal plane will be. This is one reason that some people buy very fast (larger aperture) lenses. A less expensive lens may have an aperture range of something like f/4.0 â€“ f/5.6, while you will achieve some bokeh effect with this lens, it will not be as pronounced as it would be if the lens has a f/1.6 â€“ f/2.8.

Without having a lens with a very large aperture, the other way to achieve a dramatic bokeh effect is to use a long zoom lens to shoot very close objects. Since a long lens won’t be able to focus on both something very close and things at a distance, you can achieve a strong bokeh if there is enough separation between the subject and the rest of the image.

Exposure

Understanding Depth of Field