To a lot of students starting out, F‐stops are very mysterious and take a little bit of time to understand. So what is an F-stop? The F-Stop controls two things. First is how much light is allowed to enter the lens to take your picture - your exposure. The second thing it controls is your Depth of Field. #1 – Using F-stop for exposure The F‐Stop is the actual opening of the lens. The aperture … [Read more...]
How to guarantee the best exposure
Learn how to see exposures I see a lot of blogs with pictures of their food that are too dark. Learning how to get the perfect exposure takes time. After a while you will start to see the difference in images when they are too dark or too light, you'll just know by looking at them. Look at food magazines - my FAVORITE is Donna Hay. You can see a few teaser pages of each magazine online for … [Read more...]
Camera modes – what do they mean? AV, TV, P, etc.
There's many food bloggers out there who always shoot in one of the "automatic" camera modes. I get told this in class all the time. I'm going to break down each of the modes here so you can understand what the camera is doing in each one. Different cameras might not have all these modes you see here and other cameras might have a few extra ones as well. If you see other icons for other modes … [Read more...]
The Relationship Between F-Stop and Shutter Speed
Now that we have gone over the three crucial camera settings used to achieve the proper exposure, f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO, we need to talk about how they work together. To start I'm only going to address f-stops and shutter speeds first. I will address the third component ISO in another post The f-stop, shutter speed and ISO are completely tied together for exposure. When I'm … [Read more...]
What is ISO and How It Works
ISO is the third setting that you need to know about in order to get a correct exposure. I've already addressed the other two - f-stop and shutter speed in these posts. As I've mentioned before the perfect exposure is a combination of these three settings, f-stop, shutter speed and ISO. ISO stands for International Standards Organization. In a nutshell the setting choices for ISO (50, 100, 200, … [Read more...]