This was partly taken from my most recent book titled: “The Handbook of Photographing Arizona,” but I just made a Youtube video to supplement the information. I want to do a lot more learning and tutorial based videos in the future! Let’s take a look at the exposure triangle.
The exposure triangle: All current cameras can manage exposure pretty well, so it isn’t bad to let your camera manage the details while you focus on proper composition. However, taking full control isn’t that difficult with enough knowledge.
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Images speak louder than words, therefore the graphic above should be very helpful in explaining the relationship of three key camera settings: ISO value, shutter speed, and aperture size.
Each camera setting is also responsible for different properties you can expect to see in resulting photos. For example, a high ISO value will have more image noise, a slow shutter speed will cause more motion blur, and a large aperture value will give you thinner depth of field.
The inverse of that is as you would expect. A low ISO will have less noise, a fast shutter speed will freeze action, and a small aperture will increase the depth of what looks like it is sharply in focus. Your camera will usually do a good job of managing these three settings, but don’t be scared in trying to control one or more for yourself.