Composition Rules

Aside from exposure composition is probably the most important aspect in photography. If you can't create, yes you need to create a picture it just doesn't happen, something that will grab interest your pictures will always be of the point and shoot variety. When you start learning and using the rules of composition you will add interest to your shots, and when you understand the rules well enough you will know when to break them. Of course rules are made to be broken, but it should be for a specific reason, rather than just on accident.

Some of the rules we are going to talk about have been around long before photography, I'm not an art history buff, so I don't know when they came about. Artists have been utilizing these rules for a long time, and so it was only natural that photography follow these rules as well. If you have taken art classes, I haven't, you may find some of these very familiar, if not, no worries you can learn them now.

I actually found an online version of a Kodak video I watched in my photography class about these rules, and rather than trying to go take my own pictures to show as examples I will just leave a link at the end of each section to the corresponding section in that tutorial, because they already have some great examples. The table of contents, so to speak, of the tutorial can be found here, or you can find the link to the rules of compositions on the side of the blog under the helpful links section.

Simplicity

You've all heard the acronym K.I.S.S., right? Keep it simple stupid. Well this works well for photography as well. The more that is happening in your shot the harder it is for us to know what the subject is. So keeping a shot simple can greatly improve it. Usually the simplicity comes in the background of the shot. There are a couple of ways to keep things more simple, one is using the aperture that you're so good at now, right? If you use a shallow dof, throwing the background out of focus, it makes it easier to pick out the subject and makes the shot more simple. The other is to just use a simple background, don't put your subject in front of something that is really busy, but rather something simple, like a nice blue sky, or a single colored, not too bright, wall. Try to find ways to make the background more simple and our eyes will more easily pick out the subject and your pictures will start being more interesting. This is one of the simplest rules, but it is really powerful.

Simplicity

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is sometimes also known as the golden rule, or golden ratio. The golden ratio side of it might be complicated, but the rule of thirds should be easy to understand. The golden ratio says that if you take a line and divide it into two, the ratio of the shortest segment to the longest segment should be the same as the ratio of the longest segment to the whole line.







The easy way to look at this in photography is to imagine that your frame is split up into nine equal portions, and you should be trying to place your main subject on the lines or intersections of the lines.




















So in this picture we see the frame divided up by the lines, and the intersections are circled. You should try to get your subject, and other things as well divided into thirds. Notice the branches of the tree are on the top left circle, and the tree itself follows the left line. Also the background is split in thirds, the ground fills up the lower third leaving the sky to fill the upper two thirds. This picture is a perfect example of how to use the rule of thirds.

If you look around you will see this rule in a lot of places, watch TV for example, the eyes are usually placed in the top third of the frame. Nobody is sure why this makes things more interesting to us, but some speculate that the number 3 has some specific meaning to our brains and that is what makes this great.

Another thing to mention, this isn't a rule but I think this is the best section to put it in, is to be careful about leaving enough room in the frame for the action of the shot. So for example if you are taking a picture of somebody riding a bike, and you position them with the front of the bike right up against the edge of the picture this is usually thought of as bad. It is better to leave some room in front of the bike, so the action, or movement, has somewhere to go, so it doesn't make us feel like they are just riding off the frame. The same goes for eyes, if you take a picture of somebody that is looking off, so not straight at the camera, you usually want to leave some room for them to look. Usually thinking about the rule of thirds will help you in these situations, but keep them in mind.

Rule of Thirds

Lines

Lines including shapes have always been used in artistic works. I don't know why they are so effective, but our minds are just mathematically oriented, even if you don't think they are. We see patterns and shapes everywhere without even realizing it. Utilizing this will make your pictures better. One of the best things to use lines for is to lead the viewer to your subject. If there are lines going right to the subject it will help us understand your composition and we will be more interested. Some lines that really add interest are S-curves and C-curves. If you can get something in the shape of an s, hopefully one end is right in the corner of the frame, or a c this really adds interest, again I don't know why, but it does. Another really powerful line is the diagonal line, diagonal lines can really bring out the subject in the photo.

Shapes are also included in this discussion, shapes are important to find. The most common, is the triangle. Think about portraits that you have had taken, especially with three people, the photographer probably tried to create a triangle out of your heads. Geometric shapes in your pictures will just add to the overall composition.

Lines

Balance

The tutorial link that will be at the end of this section will talk more about shapes, which goes along more with lines in my opinion, but I see their place here as well. I'm going to talk more about what I see in terms of balance. One of the biggest things I look for in terms of balance is whether or not I could really make two pictures out of the one I just took. For example, if you have four people in the picture paired up in twos, there is a great example of this in the link, then you really could have just taken two pictures, one of each of the couples. If you really want the four together, you need to do something visually so it doesn't feel like two pictures. The other big thing I look for in balance is a way to lead your attention to the subject. So there is a picture in the link with the stone heads, they start out small and get bigger and bigger, until we are at the closest one to us, which is the main subject. Another thing to look for in balance is just to throw things off balance by grouping somethings together and then having another thing by itself, this will really throw the attention to the lone object.

Balance is still one of those areas I need to work on, so I don't recognize it as quickly as I should. The key is that usually symmetry isn't interesting, so making things asymmetrical will usually make your pictures better.

Balance

Framing

Although Janae thinks it is cool to have an actual frame in the picture to add interest, you don't need a literal frame to add the concept of framing to your shot. Framing will gives us some bounds and help us to more easily focus on the subject. Think about what a picture would look like on your wall without the frame and matting around it, I bet it wouldn't look as good, and if the background matched your wall it would be hard to tell where the picture actually ended.

When thinking about framing you don't necessarily need all four sides to be framed, even just one side will add interest. Framing is usually done with other objects, trees, bushes, a flag over head, a branch, a wall, anything that will frame your subject will do. I think this is a simple enough concept that I don't need to talk to much about it, just check out the example pictures in the link and you will quickly understand what I mean.

Framing

Mergers

No I don't mean company mergers, I mean objects merging with your subject. These are almost always bad. These kind of pictures are always used for a good laugh, if you watch Headlines on Jay Leno you may see him with these types of pictures quite frequently, you know, the one with the guy posing for the camera and behind him on the wall is a moose head, but all you see is the antlers sticking out of the guy's head. Now do you know what I mean? Usually things in the background sticking out of your subject just look bad, or funny, like any rule this can be broken, but you better do it on purpose.

Mergers are also described in the link as being something cut out incorrectly. They have a picture of a big group and somebody on the left is cut halfway off, this is another type of merger you want to avoid. When taking pictures of people try not to cut them out, if you do need to cut parts of them out, don't cut out on joints, knees, wrists, elbows, necks, those are all bad places to cut.

The last merger is just your subject blending in with the background too much. A nice red shirt on a red background will just loose your subject in the background, we will just see a head then some legs, this isn't a good thing.

Most of the time mergers can be avoided simply by moving to the side, or up or down just a little bit. Again, keeping your shot simple will eliminate mergers as well. Another topic that goes along with mergers is just pay attention to what is in your picture, you need to see the whole composition not just the subject, like I said before you are creating the shot, it isn't just there. There are seven places you should always look before you take a picture, and this will really help with eliminating mergers. At first you may have to think about it, but before long your eyes will just always do it and you won't even know it, and it takes less than a second. Always look in the four corners, the foreground, the subject, and the background. Make sure only things you want in the picture are actually there.

Mergers

Assignment

Okay now its time for your assignment. For this topic I want you to take a picture showing a good and a bad example of each of the first five rules, everything up to mergers. Then I want one picture of a bad example of a merger, it is hard to show a good example of a merger, any picture without one is a good one, so we will just look for a bad one for that last rule. That is eleven pictures, but you're up to it, right? Besides how else will you learn without practicing? Again email me with the pictures or a link to where you posted them so I can link them here for others to see. Oh, and if you're reading this without having done the other assignments, espeically the one with the five shots of the same subject, then go back and do them, no skipping now.

Travis' Composition Assignment
Kevin's Composition Assignment
Stacy's Composition Assignment

POV

Okay, lets talk a little bit about point of view, or perspective. Although I haven't seen much participation yet, I am going to move forward anyway because some of you may have lost interest, or been a little confused by the exposure stuff. While I don't think you should continue until you understand it well, I will move on anyway, so if you decide to you can move on as well. You can always go back and keep reviewing the exposure stuff until it starts to sink in, but I promise the best way to start learning exposure is from trying, so please submit some pictures for the last assignment so I can help you out, and you can get more practice. Remember those don't have to be professional shots, they just need to show that you are understanding what the aperture and shutter are doing for you.

I will make the next post about some rules/guidelines that have been around since before photography, but before I get into that lets just see some shots from you. This is mostly just an assignment with little instruction from me. I want to see what you come up with, the perspective, or pov, on the shot can mean a great shot or a poor shot. Most people see a scene and just snap the shot and think it is good enough. Usually the better shot is the one you have to walk around and find. If you are hiking and come upon a waterfall, how many people do you think have taken that same picture? Probably a lot, so a better shot is probably, not always, somewhere else, from a different angle, or position. So you need to start getting in the habit of looking for a different shot than anybody else has taken. Try to find the one that will capture the most interest.

Okay, the assignment here is to go find a subject, I don't care what it is, and take five different pictures of it. Well, I want you to take a lot more than five, twenty, or even fifty if you want, but I want you to post what you think the five most interesting ones are. So take shots from all sides of the subject, take one from far away, really close up, looking down, looking up, or even just a small part of the subject, get creative. This will get you to start thinking about where the best shot really is. Hey this is the digital era, you can't hurt yourself by taking a lot of pictures, its not like you have to go pay to develop film, so be trigger happy and see what you come up with. I will try and get this assignment done soon so you can see what I have done with it.

Here are my shots, right now at temple square they have some nativities from around the world, so I took a bunch of shots of this particular one. I think I probably took around twenty. Here are the five I like the best. Which one is better? I don't know it depends on what you like, but I'll tell you my favorite definitely wasn't the first shot I took, or the "walk up" shot. I'll also put my exposure values so you can keep getting used to what they are and what they do. I took these all in aperture priority mode and most of them were at an f/11. The one at f/8 I went lower to get a more shallow dof, usually you won't see that shallow of a dof, but I was using a longer lens, we will have to talk about how lenses affect dof later. Also, like I suggested in exposure, I left my ISO at its lowest setting. Since the lighting was pretty much the same, you'll notice all the settings are pretty much the same.




f/11 1/60 ISO 200















f/11 1/60 ISO 200
















f/11 1/60 ISO 200













f/11 1/60 ISO 200
















f/8 1/45 ISO 200

Assignments

Janae's 5 shots
Kev's 5 (or 9) shots
Stacy's 5 err 11 shots

Practicing Exposure

So you know your f-stops and shutter speeds like the back of your hand now, right? If not you may want to read over the first tutorial again. This is going to give you a chance to practice what you have learned so far. I'm sorry to spend so much time on this, but exposure is fundamental, and very key to getting a great shot. I went to Temple Square tonight and while I was there I took some pictures to demonstrate the difference between the opposite ends of both shutter speed and aperture. Oh, for these purposes I didn't touch my ISO, I just left it at 200 for all the shots. Since I had a tripod I didn't care that my exposures took seconds, because I knew the camera wasn't going to shake, so no reason to raise my ISO to get faster shutter speeds while losing quality.

Shutter Speed

We all remember what shutter speed affects right? Exactly, the amount of light and motion. So here are some shots of the base of the waterfall coming off the Conference Center. The thing we are watching here is the motion of the water.

This shot was taken at a shutter speed of 20. Remember your shutter speeds are usually really fractions of a second, so this is really 1/20 of a second. Not the fastest thing in the world, but hey it was dark outside what do you expect? Notice how this stopped the motion of the water because of the somewhat fast shutter speed. You can even see some of the splashing in this picture.













Now in contrast this shot was taken with a shutter speed of 6". Remember the "(double quotes) means seconds. This exposure was much longer than the first one. Notice how the water looks much more smooth and silky. This is usually the kind of look photographers like to get out of water, it gives you the feeling that the water is still moving.













Somethings to note, first, if you didn't remember this from the first lesson, these shots were exposed with the same amount of light. I took them one after the other. So the lighting conditions were pretty much exactly the same. Remember, the other thing the shutter speed controls other than motion is light. I left the shutter open a lot longer in the second shot, meaning a lot more light was hitting my sensor, this means something had to stop the light from coming in to get the same exposure, right? Well my aperture changed from a 1.4 in the first one, wide open for the lens I was using, to 16 in the second, almost all the way closed for that lens. So by adding more light with the shutter, I took away the same amount of light by closing the aperture. Second, I took these shots in time priority mode, meaning I just had to worry about setting my shutter speed and the camera picked the appropriate aperture for me to get the correct exposure.

Aperture

You probably already know what I'm going to ask, what does your aperture affect? Well just from reading the last part you should know that it affects the amount of light getting in, and of course the second thing is dof. Here are a couple of shots through the branch of a tree at the temple. So lets see how the dof changes between the two shots.

First lets take a wide open aperture, of course the more open you are the lower the number? What, how does that work? Oh yeah, the aperture values are fractions too, why do they have to confuse us like that? This was taken at f2. The shutter speed was 20, just so you can see how it will have to change in the next picture to keep the correct exposure. Now the wider open we are the more shallow the dof, again with this backwards stuff, can't they just make it easier? So I focused on the tree in this shot and you can see how the temple is out of focus.



















Now the same shot, this time I focused on the temple and changed my aperture to f11. For those of you watching for the shutter speed here it is, 1". Again we lost light by closing our aperture so we needed to get that light back by leaving our shutter open longer. If the wind would have been blowing you would have seen some blurry trails from the tree moving during that 1 second exposure. In this shot even though I focused on the temple the tree still looks to be in focus.

Practice Time

Okay now that you have read this, and seen some examples, and of course you understand it 100%, lets get some practice in. I was kidding about the 100%, but that is what the practice is for. I promise these things will get easier as you do them more. I was confused about which way thing went for a long time, but after doing it over and over again, it is just second nature now, and the same will happen for you. What I want you to do is take 4 pictures and send them to me. You can either email them to me or post them yourself and give me the link to them. I will either just look at them and email you back with comments I have, or I would prefer if you would let others see your shots too. I can either put them directly here or link to where you have them posted. That way we can all learn from each other. Don't worry about how interesting the shots look in this, they just need to show that we understand exposure. So you need to take 2 pictures to show motion, one with stopped motion and one with the motion still going. Then 2 pictures to show dof, one with a shallow dof, and one with a large dof.

One suggestion about the dof, make sure things are kind of far apart from each other, this way they will definitely be on different planes and it will be easier to tell what you did. When I was first learning exposure I played with things in my house, so don't be afraid to do this. I had an object and took a picture making sure there was something against a far wall in the background when playing with the aperture. For the shutter speed I just took pictures of my ceiling fan. Remember these don't need to be professional pictures, they just need to show you understand exposure, and more importantly to give you practice.

Of course if you have any questions, or need some help setting up your shots don't hesitate to ask. Leaving a comment is probably the best way, so others can see your question and my answer as well, because, like you hear in school all the time, if you have the question somebody else probably does too. Have fun playing.

Your Assignments

Here are some links to what other people, besides me have done, I will update it as I am told of where people posted their assignments. Remember, if you don't have anywhere to post it, you can email it to me and I will post it for you. If you post them somewhere that I can leave a comment about what you did I will do that too, so you can get some feedback. Thanks to Janae for starting us off.

Janae Aperture Priority
Kevin
Stacy
Stacy's 2nd Attempt
Ashley Aperture Priority
Ashely Shutter Priority

Exposure

Hopefully after we are done with this you will resist any temptations you may have to use the automatic settings provided by your camera. Once you understand exposure, especially f-stops and shutter speeds, you should only ever use your aperture priority, time(shutter) priority, manual, and sometimes program settings leaving all those other settings on your dial worthless. Although those automatic settings can get you good shots, the camera is still trying to figure things out on its own, so you might as well tell it exactly what you want it to do using the manual settings.

Your camera wants to expose your media, be it film, or a sensor, with 18% of the reflected light. You can actually go to many stores and buy gray cards that reflect 18% of light all the time, this can come in handy when using the manual setting, more on this when talking about manual. It will basically use three things to control the exposure, shutter speed, aperture(f-stop) and ISO.

Shutter Speed

Okay, lets start off with the easy one, shutter speed. I'
m sure most of you already know what shutter speed is, it is basically how long the lens is open. Now, the more challenging question is, what does shutter speed do to the exposure. Your mostly affects two things, the amount of light exposed to the media, and motion.

First, the longer your shutter is open the more light will get in, this might be an obvious statement sorry. This means if your shutter is open for too long everything will start to turn white, completely white if open long enough, and o n the other side if your shutter isn't open long enough everything will start showing up black until it is pure black if the shutter wasn't open long enough to get any light in.

Second, the shutter controls motion. Lets say we are taking a picture of a child running. If your shutter is open for a long time the child will be blury, if your shutter is fast enough you can actually stop the child's motion. There are benefit s to doing both things. If you want to capture the movement of water, like a flowing stream, you would want your shutter open longer so you can get that silky look you see in great stream shots. If you are taking a picture of a race car, you probably want to show the motion, there is a technique called panning, where you move with the car, but use a long shutter speed, this makes every thing blurry around the car, but the car is sharp (if you do it right) so it looks like it is moving. However, with the running child situation, you probably want a nice clear shot, so you want a fast shutter speed to stop them in the frame.

Here are the types of values you can expect to see from your camera. These are in full stop values. Stops are used in photography to refer to a change in the exposure, so this list will show you a full stop difference in the amount of light hitting the media. Your shutter speeds on your camera will show up as fractions of a second or with "s next to them indicating the value is in seconds. So if you see the value 125 that is really 1/125 of a second. If you see 1" that is 1 second. You can see these values usually either in the view finder as you are framing our shot, or on your settings display somewhere. It is usually paired with Tv, for time value. I will list these from slow to fast shutter speed, most of the speeds are just divided in half to get the next stop, but there are a few exceptions. Your camera might have a bigger range than this, mine goes from 30" to 4000.

The location of my shutter speed on my settings display. I can also see these values as I'm looking in the view finder.1" Slowest most light.
2(0.5")
4
8
15
30
60
125
250
500
1000
2000 Fastest least light.

Quick review, without looking above, what two things does the shutter speed affect? If you can't answer this, and don't know why they are important read over the section again until you understand exactly what your shutter speed can do for you.

Aperture

Okay, now onto the part that takes most people the longest to understand. Your aperture, like your shutter, controls two things. Aperture is also called f-stop, in fact that is probably what I will call it from here on out, I just need to refer to it as aperture so you will understand where the A comes from when we talk about your camera settings. So your f-stop will control two things, once again the amount of light hitting the media, and your depth of field(dof). The depth of field simply is the amount of your shot that will be in focus. So a small depth of field would only have the area you focused on in focus, whereas a large depth of field would have everything in the shot in focus.

First, your f-stop controls the amount of light. Think of this like your pupil in your eye. When your pupil gets smaller it lets in less light, this usually happens when you are outside and it is really bright. When your pupil gets larger it lets in more light, this is usually the case when all the lights are turned off at your house at night, your eye is almost all black because your pupil has opened up to let in more light. Just like with your s hutter, if you open your aperture too much your shot will be all white, and if you close it too far your shot will be black.

Second, your f-stop controls the dof. This is backwards and took me a while to get my head wrapped around it, but the wider your aperture is open the smaller your depth of field. So if my aperture is opened all the way, just the immediate areas around where you focused will be in focus. If your aperture is closed way down your w hole picture will be in focus. For example, lets say you are out hiking and want to take a shot, well, if you decide to shoot the flower next to the path with the mountains in the background, you probably just want the flower in focus and the mountains blurred, so you would use a small aperture to get just the flower in focus. On the other hand if you wanted to take a shot of the mountains you would want to close your aperture so the entire shot would be in focus.

Here are the values you can expect to see from your camera. Again these are in full stop values, meaning if you go up or down one spot you are ch anging a full stop. Most cameras actually show values at half stops, some let you show them in 1/3 stops, and I think there are even some out there that let you see things in 1/4 stops. Again this is just part of the range, your camera may be bigger or smaller. If you don't have an SLR it is most likely pretty small, at least my old point and shoot only had I think 3 or 4 stops. And just to confuse you some more these values are all fractions so the more open you are the smaller the numbers will show up on your camera, but remembering they are fractions the values are actually getting bigger. A lot of times people will w rite their values as f/2 read as f2, but this shows that it is a fraction. Usually these values are paired up close to where your shutter speed is next to the Av, meaning aperture value.

The location of my aperture value on my settings display, I can also see this value while looking through the view finder when I'm taking the picture.

2 Widest lets in most light. Smallest dof.
2.8
4
5.6
8
11
16
22 Smallest lets in the least amount of light. Largest dof.

Another review, what two things does the aperture, or f-stop, control? If you can't answer these without looking you need to review this section again. This is one of the most confusing things in the beginning, but once you understand it, you are getting closer to knowing how to tell your camera exactly what you want it to do.

ISO

The last thing that controls the exposure is your ISO, this stands for International Organization of Standards, or something like that, yes, I realize that would be IOS and sometimes you might see it like that, but 99% of the time you will see it as ISO. This is also referred to as film speed. If you remember from buying film you might see a number in the corner of the box, usually on a colored stripe. So you might see 100 on a blue stripe. This is the film speed, or ISO for that film. The ISO basically says how sensitive the film is to light. The higher the number the more sensitive the film is to light, this means it is "faster", or basically if you are in a dark room and your shutter speeds are slow like 3" you probably can't hand hold that and get a good shot, so if you use a higher ISO your shutter speeds will start getting shorter. Now you might ask, why not just use a high ISO all the time, so we can take pictures in the dark easier. The answer is because you lose saturation as your ISO goes up and things start getting pixelated, this is often referred to as digital "noise". Some digital cameras are getting good at getting rid of some of this noise with high ISO's but the best thing to do is always use the smallest ISO you can in your situation. There are some pretty good programs out there for free that will get rid of noise for you if you have to use a high ISO.

The values you can expect to see for ISO start at 100 and just keep doubling every stop. Usually for film you see from 100 to 400. I would suggest not to go over 800 unless you really have to, because it will just look bad on most cameras. Setting your ISO will be very different by camera too, usually you can have it choose something automatically for you, which I don't recommend because in the dark it will go as high as it can, or you can set the value. You will have to look at your manual to see how to set it. I recommend not playing with your ISO until you are really comfortable with f-stops and shutters, so just set your ISO to 100 or whatever your smallest value is, mine is 200 and leave it until you have a good handle on exposure. Here are some values you might expect to see in your camera.

100 Least sensitive to light, most saturation.
200
400
800
1600 Most sensitive to light, least saturation, most noise.

Review, what does your ISO affect? If you can't answer this without looking, either read it again, or just set yours to its lowest value and leave it alone for now.

Putting It Together

Okay, lets put these three things all together. The numbers I have shown you are all full stop increments, which is nice for doing the following exercise. Remembering that your camera wants 18% reflection of light, lets say that it figures to best expose your shot using your camera set to an ISO of 100 that you need to use an f/5.6 and a shutter speed of 125(1/125 of a second). You can change any setting as long as you adjust another setting in the opposite direction and you will always get the same exposure. So lets say you want to get a larger dof, this means that you need to make your aperture smaller (you knew that already, right?) So you decide that you want to use an f/11 this is a change of 2 stops. This means you are closing your aperture (letting in less light), so to make up for that you need to adjust your shutter speed by 2 stops to let in more light. So looking at the charts above you will need to go which way to let in more light? Thats right, you need to get a slower shutter speed, so lets make it slower by 2 stops, that gives us a 30(1/30 of a second). You could have done this by adjusting your ISO to 400 also, because that is 2 stops different, but why adjust your ISO when you can adjust your shutter speed just fine? If that didn't make sense read over it again, I will give you some questions to answer below.

Okay, here is a review of what we have learned so far. So you won't be tempted to cheat and look at the answers I will talk about how to user your camera settings before I give the answers.

1. What two things does the shutter speed control?
2. What two things does the aperture control?
3. What is another name for aperture?
4. What does dof mean?
5. If you wanted a large dof would you rather your aperture be set to 4 or 16?
6. If you wanted to let in more light would you set your f-stop to 8 or 22?
7. If you wanted to stop the motion in the shot, like a child running would you rather your shutter speed be at 1" or 250?
8. If you wanted to capture the movement of a stream would you set your shutter to be 1" or 250?
9. If you wanted to let in less light would you use a shutter speed of 1" or 1000?
10. If your camera set the exposure to f/4 and 500 but you really wanted to get the entire shot in focus by changing your aperture to a 22 what would you need to change your shutter speed to?

Camera Settings

Okay now lets look at those settings on your camera for taking a picture, usually this is a little wheel on the top of the camera somewhere. It will have maybe a green box, or arrow, this is usually fully automatic, a picture of a person, a mountain, a flower, things like that. Those are all your automatic settings that you are going to stop using, right? The other settings are usually letters. The first, that we won't really use much is the P setting. This stands for program, if you really want to use it let me know, but there aren't many situations where you would want to use it. The next that we won't use often, and some cameras may not even have it, is B meaning bulb. This setting just holds the shutter open as long as you hold down the button, it lets you set the aperture you want. This is mostly used if you need an exposure longer than your camera will let you set your shutter, that means anything longer than 30" on my camera. Now, the three that you will start using the most, Av or A, S or T or Tv, and M.

Here is a picture of my settings wheel. You can see the green auto pct and the other automatic settings that we are going to stop using, then the P which isn't used very often, and the B for exposures that need to go longer than your camera will let you set your shutter speed, and the settings I will cover below, on my camera they are Tv, Av, and M.


Av or A. This is your aperture priority mode. Simply this means you get to choose what aperture you want to use and the camera will decide which shutter speed to use. This is what I use most of the time, and you would use this if you care most about the dof in the shot. So if you are shooting people you want to have a dof that allows to see their face really clear, but you might not want the backgroud, a good setting would be 8 - 16 somewhere in there. If you are taking a picture of a flower, you might want to use something really low(really this is a fraction so it is higher, but whatever) so a 2 or maybe lower if your camera will let you. If you want to get an entire building in focus you might use a 22. Then the camera will figure out what shutter speed would expose things correctly and set that for you. One thing to pay attention to is whether or not you can even expose something correctly, usually your camera has a way to warn you that it can't expose it correctly, mine when I am using this setting just flashes the shutter setting. So for example if I'm outside on a really bright day and I try to open my lens way up, like to a 2 then a shutter speed of 4000 which is the fastest my camera can do, then it will set it to 4000 but it will start flashing to show me that I am getting too much light. Usually there is some type of a wheel that lets you change your aperture setting, and as you do your camera will automatically set your shutter speed.

Here is the wheel on my camera used to set the aperture, or as we will talk about in the next section it will be used to set the shutter speed. Usually this is on your right hand somewhere, either on the back where your thumb can get it, or on the top for your finger to use it.


S or T or Tv. This is for shutter priority, the T means time. This does the opposite of aperture priority, it lets you set the shutter speed, and it automatically sets the aperture for you. You would use this setting when you care about motion in the shot. So if you are taking a picture of a stream you might want to use it and set your shutter speed to 1" or 2" and the camera will set the aperture for you. Or if you really wanted to stop the motion you would set it to a 250 or something like that to freeze everything. Again, if your camera can't expose things correctly it will usually warn you somehow, mine flashes the aperture value in this case. So if I was outside in the bright sun taking a picture of a stream and I set my shutter speed to 1" it would close my aperture all the way down and start flashing. Again you would set the shutter speed with your wheel.

M. This stands for manual. You get to set both the aperture and the shutter speed. You would use this when you don't like what your camera is doing automatically for you. For example, if I'm taking a picture of some people outside, the camera usually meters for exposure over the entire image, but lets say I really just want to expose for their faces and I don't care if I over expose the sky, or the sun for that matter. Then I would use M and set both the aperture and shutter speed. Like I mentioned way back in the beginning you can get cards to reflect 18% light, this is useful in times like these, so you put that card right in front of your camera, either set on aperture priority, or shutter priority, and see what the reading is, then go over to your manual setting and set it up to those values, then when you go to take the picture of the people it will expose better for them, rather than the entire scene. This might be a confusing setting to use until you understand everything a little better, so if this doesn't make sense thats okay. Usually in M your wheel sets the shutter speed, then you have to hit a button, which usually says Av on it, and while you are holding that you can spin your wheel to set your aperture.

This is my Av button. When shooting in manual you have to push this button, it usually looks just like this, a diagonal line with a plus and minus sign. You hold this button while you turn the wheel to set your aperture, if you aren't holding this button while you spin your wheel it will adjust your shutter speed. This is usually opposite of where your wheel is, so if your wheel is on your thumb, like mine, this will be on your finger, if your wheel is on your finger, then this button will be on your thumb.

Answers to the questions above. You really need to be able to answer these kind of questions without much hesitation so you can make good decisions when you take pictures. I know it is hard at first, but I promise with more practice it becomes second nature.

1. Amount of light, and motion.
2. Amount of light, and depth of field.
3. f-stop.
4. DOF stands for depth of field. It refers to the amount of the frame that will be in focus.
5. 16
6. 8
7. 250
8. 1"
9. 1000
10. 15

This is probably the most difficult thing to learn about photography, but if you understand it really well your shots will be a lot better. Next time I will show you some examples of the things we have talked about and give you a chance to go out and shoot some similar things to get familiar with how it works in practice rather than just in writing. For now go over this stuff until you really understand it and can answer the questions without help from looking above. You may not have all the values memorized, but you should at least know what a bigger value vs a smaller value means and does for your shot. Like with any of these tutorials if you have any questions just leave a comment and I will try to answer it, or if you have my email address you can email me. I hope this is helpful.