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 on your camera mode dial, you can look these up in your manual or goolge it to see what they do. For instance, I've seen a little flower to represent close up or macro shooting with some Canon Rebels. I've seen many posts about camera modes by other food bloggers and they are leaving out critical details about each camera mode or are just incorrect about what each mode handles with the setting of your camera and what each mode DOES NOT handle with your cameras. With each mode below please see ...
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Why You Might Need To Adjust Your Camera’s LCD and How
To get the right exposure you have to learn to interpret your camera's LCD. Your camera's LCD is not going to look exactly like your monitor when viewing the same image. In fact some camera LCD's are shockingly different from what your digital file will look like. The image above is of the set of one of our students, Patrick Evans-Hylton. He has a point and shoot camera and it did a pretty good job I must say. The LCD on that camera was also pretty accurate. If you click on the image you'll see the final shot Patrick did with his recipe. Often the LCD on the camera is actually way too bright compared to the picture it is actually taking. Which then means if you are using your LCD to judge exposure your images will be too dark! When you are shooting indoors then having an accurate LCD is very helpful. When you are shooting outside the sun is usually too bright for you to see very ...
When to change your ISO setting for exposure
By now hopefully you've seen the post talking about ISO. Its important to always shoot with the ISO at the lowest setting (usually 100) in order to keep the data in your image as clean as can been (with as little digital noise as possible). When you shoot using a tripod you will almost always be able to set your ISO at the lowest setting. However when you are hand holding (which I know you food bloggers out there love to do) there will be scenarios where you are going to have to raise the ISO because there simply isn't enough light to hand hold your camera. As a reminder, you can not hand hold your camera with the shutter speed any slower than 1/60th of a second and believe me I've tried many times only to end up with blurry images. I personally can't shoot slower than 1/125th of a second. So what do you do? You're losing light, you're at the widest F-stop your lens will go (let's ...
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 starting a shot the first thing I decide is how much depth of field I want in the shot. This decision will dictate my f-stop. When you are setting your f-stop there is a huge range to choose from. The smaller the f-stop number the smaller the depth of field also called shallow depth of field or selected focus. The larger the f-stop number the larger the depth of field. I tend to shoot about 95% of all my images with very shallow depth of field so that the foreground and background are out of ...
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, etc) have been created to represent film speed which rates how sensitive the film is to light. So in days of film if we were shooting a scene outside with bright light then we could use an ISO of 50 or 100. The brighter the light the smaller this number can be. If we were shooting a night scene then we would use film with an ISO of at least 3200. Low light needs film with higher sensitivity to light. Now, in the digital era our camera's digital chip (CCD or camera sensor) can be set to ...
What is Shutter Speed and How Does It Work?
Getting the perfect exposure is challenging for most students who take my classes. Often they are setting their camera to one of the "auto" exposure camera settings (AV, TV, Program, Fully Auto, etc) and just crossing their fingers that this setting works in getting them a good exposure. I want you to be able to control your camera and understand how it works to properly expose your images. The perfect exposure of an image is achieved by setting your f-stop, shutter speed and ISO (future post) to get the right amount of light through the lens to your camera's digital chip (where the film used to be). What is the perfect exposure? Well this can be a bit subjective. I tend to like images light and bright but someone else might want the same image a little bit darker so its really up to you. For food what I always say is the proper exposure will have your food looking fresh with bright ...
