A no-nonsense introduction to the basics of photography, for anybody new to photography or those that are reviewing the foundational concepts
Part 1 on Gear can be found here.
In this blog, we will be discussing the key concepts and terminology for photography, from exposure and the exposure triangle to bokeh to white balance to composition.
EXPOSURE
Exposure is how bright or dark your photograph is. If you raise the exposure, it brightens the image. Lowering exposure darkens it. Typically, you want to strike a balance between highlights and shadows, making sure highlights aren’t “blown out”(pure white, with no recoverable data) and shadows aren’t underexposed. If you’re trying to be more artistic or are aiming for black and white images specifically, then you can play around with higher contrast between highlights and shadows.
In order to elevate your game beyond the simple point and shoot that iPhones and iPads are capable of, you’ll want to learn manual settings and how the Exposure Triangle works.
EXPOSURE TRIANGLE (see image below)
The exposure triangle refers to three aspects of adjustment within a camera that allow in more or less light.Adjusting one of these while keeping the other two constant can have significant pros and cons, depending on what you’re going for and the lighting conditions and constraints you’re working with.
• Aperture - Serves the same function as your eye’s pupil. It enlarges and shrinks to bring in more or less light. The wider it opens, the more blurry the foreground and background become.
• Shutter Speed- Akin to how fast your eyelids can blink. Additionally, the slower the “blink,” the more blurry the subject will be. So if you are photographing wildlife and want to freeze them perfectly without any blur, you want to raise your shutter speed, typically well over a minimum of 1/500 of a second. For dimly-lit areas, you will want to have lower shutter speeds, typically in the range of 1/50 to 1/250 if shooting hand-held.
• ISO - Comes from film photography refers to the light sensitivity of the film. For both film and digital photography, the higher the ISO, the brighter, but also more grainy an image becomes. This can be used intentionally for stylized looks, but if you want clean, clear, crisp images, you’ll want to have lower ISO’s closer to 100 rather than over 1,000.
The best way to understand each of these is to use your camera in its manual setting and just play around with adjusting each one individually and observing the differences as you go.
MANUAL SETTINGS
For manual settings, you’ll switch typically between three settings: Manual, A (Aperture Priority), and S (Shutter Priority).
Manual is just full manual, full control. You’ll be changing settings on the fly, unless you’re in a studio setting or similar where the lighting stays almost constant. This can work for any situation, but Aperture and Shutter Priority make things a little easier on you for when you need to work quickly and can’t be pausing action to get your settings right. Regardless, it is my preferred setting most of the time.
For Aperture Priority, that simply means your Aperture stays at a constant aperture that you determine manually,and your shutter is the main thing that changes automatically. This is great for weddings, portraits, or similar where your subjects aren’t terribly mobile.
For Shutter Priority, it is basically the opposite of Aperture Priority. You’ll choose a fixed shutter speed, and your aperture will change to let in more or less light. This is useful in sports photography and similar for when you want to either freeze your subject perfectly in the image, or intentionally add blur to show movement.
RAW VS JPEG
This refers to the two most common photo file types: RAW and JPEG.You’re likely already familiar with JPEG—since you’re on the internet, if you’ve ever saved or uploaded an image, you’ve certainly worked with a JPEG. Think of RAW images as much larger JPEGs, with much more data, and then something you might find surprising: a muddied image that is low in contrast and saturation.
The reason for this is because RAW images contain so much more data (a regular JPEG from your camera might be roughly4mb, whereas a RAW image will be easily over 20mb), including more depth of color, shadows, and highlights. The great advantage to this is that you have more editing power in the end without losing detail in the more extreme bright and dark areas of your image (and can better recover those in order to salvage some images), and more flexibility in finer color adjustments.
Shooting RAW can be unnecessary a lot of the time,but if you know you’ll be doing heavy editing, or are worried that the lighting conditions are too contrasty, then opt for RAW. You can also opt for your camera’s RAW+JPEG setting which creates one of each for every capture. Then, if you know you won’t need the RAW files, or at least all of them, you can delete those to save storage space.
DEPTH OF FIELD
Depth of field is essentially how much of your subject and the surrounding area is in focus (sharp) or out of focus(blurry). If you hold an object close to your eye and focus on it directly, you'll notice everything in your peripheral vision becomes quite blurry; this is an example of a shallow depth of field. Think of your phone's "portrait mode" that blurs out the background, as that is an emulation of a camera lens's shallow depth of field.
If you hold that same object further away from your eye, or even set it on a table and take a few steps back, the contrast in blurriness from that object and the background
A lens's ability to have shallower depth of field is most often an indication of its higher quality (and price).
WHITE BALANCE
Put very simply, white balance is color cast, or how blue or orange (or green or another color) your image is. Think of daylight, then think of white fluorescent light, then perhaps streetlights. There is significant color change between these three,and your camera must either be set to automatically attempt to adjust for this change, or it must be set. For beginners, automatic white balance will work in most cases. However, if you want to try it, most cameras have presets for sunlight, clouds, tungsten, fluorescent,etc. You can also manually match the light using light temperature,which is measured in degrees of Kelvin.
For quick reference: Sunlight is between 5000-6500K. Candlelight is much warmer in color at 1000-2000K. Overcast sky is above 6500K.
FRAMING & COMPOSITION
RULE OF THIRDS
Using a grid of two vertical lines, and two horizontal lines, place the subject at one of the four intersecting portions of the grid.
LEADING LINES
Natural lines within the frame leading the viewer to look at the main point of interest. These lines can be horizon lines, windows, buildings, telephone wires, and more. Anything that leads to the subject.
LEARNING MORE
Studying movie film stills is a great way to enhance your creativity and learn what’s possible as well as unconventional, but still beautiful ways of framing photos. CreativeToolbox features a number of useful visualization and inspiration tools, but the most applicable website for studying movie, TV, and advertising frames would be to look at FrameSet.
An excellent book to begin your study with is The Visual Story by Bruce Block. It is a superb, simple book with no fluff; straight to the point and informative, with lots of useful illustrations.
PHOTO EDITING TERMINOLOGY
EDITING
Editing a photo means to adjust brightness, contrast, colors, and more.
RETOUCHING
Retouching is typically more granular and transformative; often involves removing undesirable visual elements.
COMPOSITING
Compositing is the combination of multiple images into one cohesive image; this also involves aspects of editing and retouching.
COLOR GRADING
Adjusting the color of an image to match a specific look, feel, and style, often adjusting color and contrast,brightness, etc.
Regardless of which avenue of photo editing you will typically work with, you’ll often come across the terms“presets” and “LUTs” (Look-Up Tables). These are essentially the equivalent of “filters” on Instagram; they are more in-depth adjustments.
To get into photo editing on any level, these are the most essential terms that you’ll want to look more into (mainly in Adobe Photoshop, but other programs have them or versions of them):
- Adjustment Layers
- Curves Adjustment Layer
- Levels Adjustment Layer
- Layer Masking
- Blending Modes
- Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools
LIGHTING
NATURAL LIGHTING
Natural lighting is using the available, ambient lighting around you. Typically easiest to work with sunlight outdoors without any artificial lighting nearby (street lights can cause white balance issues). The best lighting conditions are in the early morning or evening in what’s known as “Golden Hour.”
ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING (STROBE & CONTINUOUS)
Strobe lights (“flash”) or continuous LED lights are useful for controlled conditions, high end advertising photography, product photography and more. Typically, strobe lights are off-camera, triggered by a device set on the hotshoe of the camera. The benefits of strobes over continuous LED is affordability and punch in broad daylight, something that continuous LEDs struggle against. The benefit of the continuous LEDs is that you can also use them for video work, and they have built-in RGB color changing capabilities.
It takes time to learn off-camera lighting, but is rewarding and well worth the effort. For beginners, I’d advise sticking with natural lighting while practicing fundamentals of photography before diving into artificial lighting.
