Practical Photography

Getting the exposure right is all about getting the best amount of light to produce the image. This is controlled by aperture and shutter speeds. I first started out the old fashioned way using an old Pentax film SLR where there was no auto mode and you couldn’t look at the image on a screen and discard it if it was no good.

Sometimes you can just leave your camera on automatic and the camera will do all the work for you, but a camera hasn’t got your eye, your creativeness and you will be relying on a camera to make your artistic decisions. If you have a good quality SLR camera and just keep it on automatic then you might as well have saved some money and bought a bog standard point and shoot camera, even these have a manual mode.

The aperture can be turned on the lens of the camera making a hole that can be increased or decreased in size. The bigger the hole the more light can get through and the picture is more exposed, too much light can make details seem bleached or burnt out, this is a useful creative tool but for good quality images too much exposure means you can’t make out details .

To balance out the aperture you can use shutter speed this is basically the speed in which the shutter opens and closes, letting the light through for the exposure. Usually a rule of thumb is, the bigger the aperture the faster the shutter speed.

A popular trick that many photographers play about with is using long shutter speeds to show movement and blurred images, the exposure for this needs to be balanced by using a small aperture, the smallest being f22(the bigger the number the smaller the aperture). If you have a digital camera it is always good to play around with different exposures in different situations.

Also when taking photos of the stars it is a good idea to have a long exposure so stars can be seen clearly, have a look at this exposure wheel it can act as a bit of a guideline but as always the more you go out and do it the better you’ll get, so get out there and play!