PHOTOGRAPHY

A lesson on Photography:

Anna from creativebent.net visited our JRN-372 class and showed us the many features of her camera. She went into detail about aperture, shutter, and ISO.

Aperture is basically the size of the lens opening that controls the brightness of the light that reaches the sensor of film, kind of like our pupil of our eye. Our pupil enlarges or contracts to admit more light or less light. Aperture size is indicated by the f-number or f-stops. For this blog, I will use f-stops. Although I don’t know the full range of f-stops that can be utilized, the range Anna referred to was between f/1.4 to f/16.

The smaller f/1.4 f-stop means with the smaller f-stop, the larger the lens opening and vice versa, the larger, f/16 f-stop, the smaller the lens opening. See image below for an example.

And here are three photos below with three f-stop lenses in different ranges, so you can get an idea of what the aperture does.

Shutter Speed and Aperture work together and is hard to explain without a photo to show how they affect each a photo, but shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter is open to control the amount of light that reaches the light-sensitive surface. Both shutter speed and aperture affect sharpness. Shutter speed affects the sharpness of moving objects; aperture affects depth of field–sharpness from near to far. Here is an examples of shutter speed ranges, but it is not all-inclusive: 1 sec, 1/2 sec, 1/4 sec, 1/8 sec, 1/15 sec, 1/30 sec, 1/60 sec, 1/125 sec  and can go on as far as 1/8000 sec. So, basically, the faster the shutter speed, the sharper a moving object will be. The below image shows how the 1/160 sec photo is much sharper than the 1/3 sec photo.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the measure of the digital camera’s sensor’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO number (faster the film), the less light required to produce an image, so use a 400 to 1600 speed indoors and use the room’s existing light, but use a lower ISO range, such as 50-200 for brightly lit outdoor scenes. Different speeds help get the best photo for each situation. Faster speed films lave lower resolution and show less detail; meaning they produce grainier pictures. With a lower ISO (slow film), the finer the grain structure and the smoother and more detailed the image.

The left photo is a low ISO and the right is a high ISO. See the difference?

To explain all three elements (Aperture, Shutter, and ISO), view the video below: