Hellobee

Photography 101 – White Balance

The three most important things to understand about photography are aperture, shutter speed and ISO.  These three work together to determine the exposure of your picture, or the total amount of light allowed onto your camera’s sensor.  Let’s start with the one that’s most fun – the aperture.  Aperture controls both the exposure and the depth of field, and I’ll explain how below.

Aperture & f-stops

The aperture is the size of your lens opening when you take your picture.  The different aperture settings are called f-stops.  A smaller f-stop means your lens lets in more light, and a larger f-stop means your lens lets in less light.  Yep it’s opposite so it’s kinda confusing.  So if you’re taking a picture in low light, a smaller f-stop like f/4 would let in more light, and if you’re taking a picture in bright light, a larger f-stop like f/22 would let in less light.

These are the standard full stops.  Each one has half the light of the previous f-stop.

f/2.8 (more light)
f/4
f/5.6
f/8
f/11
f/16
f/22 (less light)

Check out these 6 identical images below where I only adjusted the aperture. The first image has the least light and biggest aperture so it’s the darkest, and the last image has the most light and smallest aperture so it’s the lightest.  Note that there are 1/3 f-stops in between the standard full stops listed above, which vary depending on your lens.

f/20, f/18

f/11, f/9

See what a difference an f-stop makes?

Depth of Field

The most interesting thing about aperture is that it also allows you to control the depth of field.  Depth of field refers to the amount of your picture that’s in focus.  Smaller f-stops (a lot of light) will give you a shallow depth of field, which means that your subject will be in focus, but the background will be fuzzy. Typically shallow depth of field is used for portraits and macro/detail shots like the one below.  You can see in this picture that some of the flowers are in focus, while the tree in the background is blurry.  You could actually use a larger f-stop to take this picture and have more of the background be in focus.  It depends on what you want, so you can really play around with depth of field!

A larger f-stop like f/22 on the other hand will let in less light, but you will have a wide depth of field, or everything in your photograph will be in focus.  This is great for landscape shots like the one below.

AV – Aperture Priority

Instead of shooting in full manual mode (M), an easier way to practice adjusting your aperture is to set your camera to AV, or aperture priority. Aperture Priority allows you to manually set the aperture, but the camera will automatically select the shutter speed. Once you’ve set your camera to AV on the main dial, take a picture.  Take a look at your picture, and adjust your aperture depending on whether you want your picture lighter or darker.  To adjust your aperture, simply turn the grooved dial behind the shutter.

Taking a Picture in Manual Mode

First I look in my camera’s viewfinder, aim it at what I want to photograph, and press the shutter halfway to focus on my subject.  I look at the light meter that shows up both inside my viewfinder and on the back of my camera screen. I adjust my aperture by holding down the aperture button on the back of the camera, while turning the grooved dial on top of the camera until the light meter reads 0.  That means whatever I’m focused on should be correctly exposed according to the camera.  If my picture were too light or too dark, I would adjust the aperture and retake the picture.

I know this can seem a little overwhelming, but just knowing how to set your white balance and how to shoot in Aperture Priority can have a huge impact on your pictures.  And I promise once you get the hang of it, shooting in full manual mode really does become second nature.

Next up: Shutter Speed and ISO!