Stop Worrying about Settings
When people start photography, they start with the exposure triangle. Eventually, they’ll stumble upon pages or videos, trying to find the “perfect” setting or a “hack” for every single picture taken. Well, I’ll say it right now. Stop wasting your time. You’re not going to find it because it doesn’t exist. If you end up walking around with the settings of 1/250 shutter speed, 100 ISO, and f4 or something for every single picture you take, chances are your photos are not going to be what you want them to be. They’ll probably be overexposed or underexposed depending on the lighting in the setting you’re in. Or because your aperture is at f4, maybe something in your frame is a bit out of focus. There are many things that can go into why one would choose certain settings over another. What are those reasons? In this video, I’ll cover why I would choose certain settings and show some example pictures going through my thought process.
Like mentioned in the beginning, most of us learn the exposure triangle when we decide to really start wanting to get better in photography. We can separate those settings into 3: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. They each play a role into how your picture ends up looking. Your shutter speed can either be fast or slow. Having a slow shutter speed will make any type of motion in the photo have motion blur, whether that’s you doing the moving or anything within the frame that’s moving. Having a fast shutter speed lets you essentially freeze anything that’s moving in your frame, such as a moving person crossing the street. With aperture, you are controlling your depth of field. The smaller the f number or f stop is, the more shallow your depth of field is going to be. A shallow depth of field really separates your subject from the background and foreground. Another important aspect when choosing a smaller f number is the amount of light you let into the sensor. The smaller the f number is, the more light you are able to allow in the sensor of your camera. This coincides with shutter speed because the more light you gather into the sensor, the faster your shutter speed should be to maintain exposure. Moving on to the final part of the triangle, the ISO. Your ISO allows you to brighten your image when raising it, or darkening the image when lowering it. That’s basically it. When I shoot in manual, it’s always the last setting to touch as there’s really no creative process when thinking about ISO. I raise it or lower it depending on my shutter speed and aperture and that’s basically it. The only catch with your ISO is if it becomes too high, you’ll start noticing grain in your photos. But the cameras and lenses that are out nowadays allow us to push that number further than what the limit used to be. With those 3 settings, they each have their own influence on your photos. Check out my video below giving some examples of pictures I’ve taken and what thought processes went through my head to decide what settings I wanted to use.
Your exposure settings aren’t supposed to be fixed, they should be changing to fit with your vision for what you want your photo to be. Whether that’s having a high enough shutter speed or having a shallow depth of field, everyone’s setting is going to be different, even if they’re at the same location. There is no right or wrong answer. Also, I mentioned before the examples that I use manual mode when shooting, but that’s really for only 5-10% of my shots. For the majority of photos I take, I shoot in aperture priority mode. This allows me to fully focus on aperture which is the most important for most photos taken anyways and that’s the setting I want to control for almost every shot I take. I’ve talked about using aperture priority in my street photography tips video so check that out if you want to see more of that. That’s all from me this week. I’ll talk to you all later.