In a nutshell
- Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO are the three key factors for getting correct exposure in your photos — understand these and you’re well on your way.
- The longer the focal length, the better you can photograph distant subjects. The shorter the focal length, the better you can capture wide scenes like landscapes or architecture.
- Auto modes make life easier, but learning manual controls lets you execute your shots exactly the way you picture them — this guide covers all the photography fundamentals you need to get started.
Aperture
Aperture controls how wide the lens opens and therefore how much light hits your camera’s sensor. You can recognize an aperture value by the f/ in front of it.
Burn this rule of thumb into your memory:
The smaller the aperture number, the wider the opening, the more light hits your camera’s sensor — meaning small number, lots of light, and large number, little light.
Aperture Priority – Mode A (Av)
Your camera has a mode A (or Av) that lets you set your aperture value yourself. This means you decide how much light hits your sensor, and your camera is kind enough to set the appropriate shutter speed for you.
Aperture and Depth of Field
By choosing different aperture values, you control not only how much light hits your sensor, but also how much depth of field your image has.
The smaller the aperture number, the shallower the depth of field in your image. That means at f/1.8, the background is very blurry, while at f/13, the entire image is sharp throughout.
You can read more about aperture in our article: How your camera’s aperture works.
Shutter Speed
Shutter speed — also called exposure time — determines how long your camera’s shutter stays open when you take a photo. It’s measured in seconds.
The shutter curtains are usually open for only fractions of a second. If your camera display shows 1000, light only hits your sensor for 1/1000 of a second.
Shutter Priority – Mode S (Tv)
When you set your camera to Mode S, you control how long light hits your sensor yourself. Your camera then sets the appropriate aperture.
Here’s how it works:
- Shutter speed gets shorter (less light) → the aperture opens up → the aperture number gets smaller (more light is let in)
- Shutter speed gets longer (more light) → the aperture closes down → the aperture number gets larger (less light comes through)
How Shutter Speed Affects Your Subject
There are two fundamental effects shutter speed has on how your subject is rendered:
#1 A fast shutter speed freezes your subject.
Why? If the shutter is open for only 1/4000 of a second, the camera captures every tiny detail in that exact moment.
#2 A slow shutter speed gives your subject motion blur.
Why? If the shutter is open for two seconds, everything moving in your frame will appear blurry — your subject has traveled a certain distance during that time.
Focal Length
Focal length relates to your camera’s lens and is measured in millimeters.
Here’s what you need to know about focal length:
- With a short focal length, you need to get close to your subject to fit it fully in the frame.
- With a long focal length, you can be relatively far away and still capture your subject clearly.
- With a zoom lens, you can adjust your focal length on the fly.
- With a prime lens, as the name suggests, you have a fixed focal length.
What focal length options are there?
Depending on a lens’s focal length, it goes by a different name. Common terms are:
- Wide-angle lenses – up to approx. 25 mm
- Standard lenses – approx. 25 to 50 mm
- Telephoto lenses – from 50 mm
Don’t be surprised if you come across different figures in other sources — there’s no perfectly clear-cut definition for these. These values apply to cameras with an APS-C sensor, by the way. Professional cameras often have a full-frame sensor, for which you need to multiply these values by 1.5.
Exposure
Using your camera’s exposure compensation, you can influence the exposure of your image yourself. Sometimes this is necessary, since your camera doesn’t always nail the exposure on its own.
Every photo can be underexposed, overexposed, or correctly exposed — your light meter shows you this. In Auto, P, A, and S modes, your camera decides what the correct exposure is.
Dynamic range: Your camera can’t always see what your eye sees. At sunset, there’s a huge contrast difference between the foreground and background.
Your eye can handle both at once, but unfortunately your camera can’t. It picks either the foreground or the background and adjusts the exposure accordingly — and it doesn’t always get it right.
Your camera also often struggles when your image contains a lot of white or a lot of black.
Solution: Simply correct it yourself using exposure compensation.
ISO
ISO describes the light sensitivity of your camera sensor and stands for “International Standard Organisation”.
The common scale for ISO values looks like this:
- Small number: The sensor takes in little light
- Large number: The sensor takes in a lot of light
What does ISO do for you?
When you increase your ISO value, your camera’s sensor becomes more sensitive to light. You have more light available and therefore more flexibility when setting the shutter speed.
What’s the catch?
Simply cranking up the ISO whenever you’re shooting in low light sounds great — but there’s a trade-off: image noise. The higher the ISO value, the more noise your image has. When noise starts appearing depends heavily on your camera. Really good cameras barely show any noise even at ISO 6400, while budget cameras can start looking grainy as early as ISO 800.
That said, you can also use noise creatively, as in the photo below.
White Balance
The temperature of light is a seriously complex topic — and a fascinating one. You’ll often find yourself shooting in all kinds of different lighting situations: indoors, outdoors, in sunshine, under an overcast sky.
Each time, the light has a different color. Your eye doesn’t notice, but your camera perceives these colors very differently.
What do you need to keep in mind when shooting?
Your camera can usually assess the color of the light on its own, so automatic white balance will get you pretty far.
It gets tricky with mixed lighting — for example, when you have two different light sources in the same scene. In that case, you may need to experiment and try out different white balance settings.
If you edit your images afterward, we really recommend shooting in RAW mode. That way you can adjust the white balance after the fact. With JPG files, this is only possible to a very limited extent.
Mistakes can happen, and they might look something like this:
