Ok so we have an understanding of what a composition is, but now how do we make the camera see what we want it to see? As you probably can tell, cameras have so many different settings, menus, buttons, and uses. Each button does something different and you could easily spend an hour going through every setting and menu. In this blog, I'm just going to focus on 5 of the most important features and settings. Shutter Speed, Aperture, ISO, White Balance, and File Size. Each setting has a specific function, but they all affect the image in one way or another.
Starting off, Shutter Speed is simply how long it takes for the shutter to open and close. The shutter is a sort of block that goes between the lens and the sensor or film. The Shutter Speed is most commonly going to be a fraction of a second, unless you are shooting in a dark environment and have a surface to put the camera on. On my camera, the shutter speed can be changed by moving a wheel and there are a couple screens that display the setting.
Rolling the wheel to the left will make the shutter move slower, and to the right makes it move faster. In the photo above, the shutter speed is set to 1/4000th of a second - really fast. The faster the shutter moves, the less time light will have to enter the sensor. Or in simpler terms, the faster the Shutter Speed, the darker the image. There is a general rule of thumb for shooting handheld, which is that the slowest one should have their shutter speed when not using a tripod is 1/60th of a second. This rule is in place because any slower than that would allow for motion blur from the camera moving in your hands. 1/60 is fast enough to not be affected by minor movements in your hand.
Next up, we have aperture. The aperture of a camera is actually found in the lens. It is a sort of door that can be made smaller or larger, depending on what you want it to be.
As you can see above, f1.4 is much larger than f8. An easy way to explain this is that the bigger the hole, the more light will be able to enter the sensor. So in a dark environment, you'll probably want to use a bigger aperture (smaller number) so that you can absorb as much light as possible. Now, there are other affects that come with opening or closing aperture rings. Those other affects are called Depth of Field.
As you see above, smaller numbers make blurry backgrounds. SO imagine this situation - you are taking a portrait of someone who has a mountain behind them. You want to be able to tell that there is a mountain back there, but it's not the main subject so you want it to be kinda blurry so that all the focus is on the person. In that situation, it would probably be a good idea to try to shoot somewhere around F8-F5.56. A rule of thumb I learned while interning for a corporate photographer and videographer is this, when shooting portraits, the aperture should not be any more open than F2.8 and not higher than F5.56. This rule is important especially in darker environments. It is unadvised to go below 2.8 because focus will start to fall off of the subject and some of their face or body will be blurry. So in order to have all of your subject in focus, stay around F2.8 and it'll be crystal clear.
Some cameras have a button that says "Av" that must be held before moving the Shutter Speed wheel in order to set the Aperture, while other cameras have its own wheel located by your right thumb that is used to change the Aperture.
Notice how the screen says the aperture is set to 0.0. This is because there is no lens attached therefore there is no Aperture on the camera.
Okay, now, what is ISO? Basically, ISO is how sensitive your camera is to light. I'm not sure how practical this example is, but you know when you've been wearing sunglasses and you take them off how everything is too bright and your eyes start to hurt? We could say, for example sake, that when you were wearing sunglasses, the ISO is 200, then when you take them off the ISO is 1000. Or in other words, the higher the number, the brighter things will be.
See how when the ISO is increased, the brighter an image becomes? You probably can't tell in these images, but there is a sort of side affect of increasing a camera's ISO. That side affect is referred to as noise. But it's not noise in the common use of the term, it's visual noise. When you increase the ISO past around 800, noise will slowly begin to flood the image until it just looks like a bunch of random color dots.
The photographer who took these photos changed their other settings to match the exposure value of each image so that you could see the different noise levels in each image. Every camera performs best at a different ISO setting, so it's a good idea to do some research or test it out yourself to find the best ISO setting for your camera. The camera used in the photo above looks like it performs best around ISO 400, which is not an uncommon value to produce the clearest images. But notice how pixelated ISO 12,800 is? You're probably wondering why this happens, and it's a simpler answer than you're expecting. Basically, when your ISO is extremely high, the camera's sensor is guessing what color make up each pixel. We know that images are made up of many pixels that range in color from Red, Green, and Blue. So now looking at the 12,800 image, there are random dots of Red, Green, and Blue because the camera was guessing what color to put where and it guessed incorrectly. This happens with every camera, no matter what.
On most cameras, there is a button designated to changing the ISO, but other cameras like some Nikons or Sonys have the ISO buried in the camera menus.
What about White Balance?
White Balance does not affect the brightness of an image, only the three mentioned settings directly affect brightness. White Balance only has an impact on the colors in an image. The name is referring to what the camera thinks is white. Since different lights are different colors (aka Temperatures), you need to tell the camera what white is. There is a long used tool called a gray card which helps the photographer determine what temperature the light is.
Gray cards come in a wide variety, some are just medium gray, while others are white, gray, and black and some even have colors too.
Photographers use these tools in order to manipulate color in an image to appear how they think is best. The photographer positions the gray card prominently in the composition for one photo and then changes the white balance settings either in camera or on the computer after the shoot.
Here's an example of a photographer who changed their white balance settings on the computer. You can see that the temperature is much cooler on the left than it is on the right. By having an item like a gray card, the photographer is able to manipulate the colors to match what they look like to our naked eye.
Now, there are many different preset White Balance settings included in every camera.
As you can see above, the different White Balance settings dramatically alter the color of an image. Tungsten makes the image very cold while Shade makes an image very warm. The perfect White Balance setting will be different for nearly every situation and can even be set to a custom temperature, measured in ºKelvin.
Finally, let's talk about File Size. There are two most commonly used file extensions when taking pictures. RAW files (.cr2) and JPEG files (.jpg).
To put it as simply as I can, RAW files are like an open ledger, when you access them on a computer, you can rewrite the file and change important settings, like white balance. JPEG files are like a closed book. Once you shoot it, the file is written and saved. Then any further changes are being made on top of the saved file and overwrites the original file. So RAW allows you to change the file, JPEG forces you to overwrite the image files and damages the original image. RAW files are also a larger file, meaning more data is stored and accessible.
From this one example photo, it is easy to see that RAW files contain more information and produce a clearer image.
See also how RAW files often yield more accurate colors and give the photographer full control over changing white balance temperature long after shooting the images.
I hope that helps you understand the 5 most important settings on a camera
Grant, this is a great overview on the essential features of manual camera operations. You follow a logical order in presenting each setting, and explain both its operation and the photographic concept behind it very succinctly.
Maybe one point you could add to better explain the depth of field concept is that foregrounds as well as backgrounds will be blurred at wider apertures. I’ve often explained it in the same terms you have and found the student’s takeaway is that everything closer to the camera than the subject will be in focus, rather than a specific range of feet or inches proximate to the focal point. Also, in your opening you should identify “on Canon cameras” rather than “on my…