Beginners – Understanding the digital camera settings

Any photograph has both an aperture and a shutter speed. The aperture regulates how wide the lens opening is, while the shutter speed regulates how long the shutter was left open. These two items, in tandem, regulate the exposure of a photograph.

In an automatic mode, the digital camera chooses its own combination of aperture and shutter speed to create a good exposure - you don’t have to do any of the thinking. But sometimes, you want more control over your digital camera, and that’s when shutter and aperture priority come into play.

These two modes allow you to wrest control of either of the two variables away from your digital camera. In shutter priority, you control the shutter speed while the camera determines the aperture. This allows you - with sufficient lighting conditions - to set a shutter speed fast enough to freeze sports action or slow enough to create a motion blur.

Aperture priority mode allows you control over the depth of field of an image. The more open the lens is, the shallower the depth of field is. Generally, for portrait photography small apertures are used so as to create a silky-smooth background behind a person kept in sharp focus. Conversely, in landscape photography large apertures are used to keep as much of the scene sharp as possible.

What to worry about: Using higher apertures requires more light in a scene for a proper exposure. If you set your aperture to a higher number - f/8 or f/10, for example - the camera may need to choose a really long shutter speed to ensure a proper exposure. If your hands are shaky and if you aren’t using a tripod, this could result in a blurred photo. Similarly, your digital camera may not have a low-enough aperture to support very fast shutter speeds - 1/800 or 1/2000 of a second, for example. If that’s the case, either the digital camera will refuse to take the picture or your photo will be underexposed.

ISO

What is it: ISO is a carry over from the film days. Film used to be rated at a certain speed, indicating its sensitivity to light. Now, the ISO setting on your digital camera is a way of setting the sensor’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO setting, the more sensitive the sensor on your digital camera becomes.

Where to find it: Most digital camera manufacturers hide ISO on one of the submenus within the camera settings. On some digital cameras, it may have its own button labeled ISO.

What it does: Ever become frustrated by your inability to take a photo indoors without blurring it because of your hands shaking? ISO may be the fix you are looking for. By setting the ISO higher, the camera is able to use faster shutter speeds or higher apertures, allowing you more creative freedom and more ability to keep shooting in challenging lighting conditions.

What to worry about: The higher the ISO setting on the digital camera, the more noise in the resulting image. Noise is represented by strangely-colored pixels present throughout your photograph. Especially on older or more compact digital cameras, noise can become a real issue. Take a few different photographs at different ISO settings and learn how much noise you can tolerate.

White Balance

What it is: A way of telling your digital camera how to compensate for the color of the light around you.

Where to find it: Like ISO, white balance can either be set through a sub-menu or through a button on the outside of your digital camera.

What it does: Every light source has a color temperature to it. Florescent lighting emits a greenish light, while the normal household lighting is orange. This creates a challenge situation for your digital camera. While you might not notice the lighting color just walking around, you’re sure to notice it in your photographs. To prevent this, the camera tries to set the white balance of the image as a way to compensate against the lighting color.

The problem is that the digital camera isn’t very good at this. As a result, there’s typically a number of white balance settings you can adjust to clue your digital camera in on the lighting conditions in the photo. Typically, there are settings pre-created for tungsten and florescent lighting, as well as for conditions as specific as cloudy or sunny days. By evaluating the scene yourself and keying it in, the resulting white balance in your photograph should be a lot more accurate than if you had left it up to the digital camera alone.

What to worry about: Always REMIND YOURSELF to check the white balance setting when lighting conditions change. If you forget and leave the digital camera set on tungsten, for example, you’ll be wondering why all your photos from the baseball game suddenly have that strange hue to them. The digital camera isn’t smart enough to recognize when the light has changed.

Further tips:  read Webmasters article - Understanding the White balance of digital cameras - found on the Sitemap on the left-top side.

and/or Others articles: More on setting digital camera modes, and/or

Explanation of Exotic modes.   LINK  to  article outside of this site - click here.