When I was a child, my grandmother bought herself a fancy Polaroid. It represented the latest in camera technology. Not only was it fully automatic, it produced prints magically. All you had to do was snap, shake, and wait. Within minutes, your photograph would appear. Despite, all this high-end automation, my grandmother had a tough time taking a good photograph. Things were either overexposed or underexposed, or we had red-eye, or some heads were cropped out of the photograph.
Ansel Adams said of photography, “ If we fail to comprehend the medium, or relinquish our control to automation of one kind or another, we allow the system to dictate the results instead of controlling them to our own purposes.” My grandmother was a classic example of what Ansel Adams was talking about. She was slave to her camera’s automation. Having no understanding of the basics of photography, her photographs oftentimes came out awful. Many people come to me with questions about their cameras. More often than not, they have invested a good sum of money on a fancy DSLR with lots of bells and whistles, and they are confused because they are having a hard time taking the photographs they want to take. Usually, they place their camera on automatic mode. They let the camera make all the decisions for them. They cannot figure out why their photos did not come out they way they envisioned them. I think putting your camera on automatic or program mode is like buying a Ferrari and setting it on cruise control moving along at only 45 miles per hour. You get to your destination, but without utilizing all of your car’s potential. You might as well have bought yourself a Toyota Celica because it will get you to your destination just as nicely and cost you a lot less.
That’s why I tell people who are thinking about investing money on an expensive camera to think about buying a point and shoot camera first, particularly if they have no interest in learning the basics of photography. There are many times when a point and shoot will do just fine. I took a Canon PowerShot SD 6000 to Tanzania and I got a bunch of great, high-quality shots. It is a wonderful camera and I still use it whenever I don’t care to lug my Nikon D300 with all its lenses around.
For those who have gone ahead and bought that expensive camera, and want to learn the basics, I dedicate these next blog entries to you. You are that eager neophyte who wants to master your camera so that you can make better, more creative photographs. So the first thing I’ll discuss about photography is exposure. But in order to understand exposure better, it might help to talk about what a camera is exactly.
Think about your camera. What is it and how does it work? Well, basically, your camera is a light proof box with a lens attached to it. It allows light inside the box, which splashes onto some type of photosensitive material. That photosensitive material used to be film. Today it is most likely a digital sensor. How much light you let in, and for how much time you let that light into the box is how you control exposure. If you have an SLR like my Nikon you view, focus, and compose the picture through a viewfinder which aligns with your lens. Your camera contains a reflex mirror that sits right behind that lens. Light reaches your eye through the viewfinder with the help of that mirror. It goes through a prism on the top of your camera, flipping the image right side up for you. Behind the mirror you find the shutter, and behind that is where the light sensitive material sits. Not only do you compose your photograph in the viewfinder, you control exposure by reading the light meter located at the bottom of your viewfinder. Your camera is most likely like mine, adhering to the 35mm format, which in the film days meant it created a negative measuring 36 x 24 mm. That makes it a 3:2 format. This is far the most popular format for photography.
So what do we mean when we talk about a photograph’s exposure? Exposure refers to the action of light falling on this photosensitive material in your camera. If too much light hits it, the image is overexposed. If too little light hits it, the image is underexposed. When the proper amount of light reaches it, the image has a proper exposure. You determine your exposure by pressing down on your shutter release button, which lights up the meter at the bottom of your viewfinder. On my next blog post, I’ll talk about the three controls we have when determining proper exposure.