Unit Three : Photography Basics
Thom Holmes via Unsplash. Note the light meter, and the indicator’s position to the left - what does that mean for the exposure?Let’s Try
Put your camera in Aperture Priority Mode (note: your camera may refer to this mode differently). What this does is let you control the aperture, and the camera set the shutter speed accordingly. Turn the control wheel in one direction to modify the aperture. You should now see instead that f/number change to correspond with what you changed the dial to. You should also notice that the speed changed as well. To compensate for the modification of one parameter (aperture), the camera changed another one (shutter speed). The exposure remains “good,” with the light meter indicator sitting right in the middle. We’ll explore what this means in greater detail in each of the coming shutter speed, aperture and ISO lessons.
In manual mode, the camera lets you modify all three parameters yourself without attempting to compensate to keep the same global exposure. It will usually let you know how far away you are from what it considers the “good” exposure. Whether you want to follow its recommendation is up to you.
This should hopefully give you a good idea of what is going on in a camera’s brain, and what the A, S and M modes are for, but we have left a lot of things out, to be covered in the next lessons.
Canon Outside of Auto - try it for yourself!Try it out for yourself with a complex scene. Go to this site, and play around with the different settings. Note that while the sample camera is Canon and uses Canon terminology, the theory is there and will translate across camera brands. Don’t worry too much right now about fully understanding what you’re doing, just look at the light meter and try and make a good exposure, an overexposed photo, and an underexposed photo. How does the light meter express that?