EXPOSURE PARAMETERS

APERTURE

1

The aperture is a series of blades inside your lens that can be opened up or closed to let in more or less light, making the image brighter or darker. Adjusting the aperture value also alters your depth of field, determining how large your zone of sharp focus is. A wide aperture of f/2.8 will let in lots of light but also give you a shallow depth of field, blurring the background, while a narrow aperture of f/22 will let in less light, but deliver a sharper scene throughout.

SHUTTER SPEED

2

This is how long the sensor is exposed to light for. Having the sensor exposed to light for longer will result in a brighter picture, but will also create more chance to pick up movement, such as motion blur if a person is walking through the frame, or camera-shake caused by the vibrations in your hands. It’s called shutter speed because in DSLRs and older SLR cameras you’d have a mechanical shutter in front of the sensor, or film, that would open and close to let in and block out the light.

ISO VALUE

3

This value changes how sensitive to light the sensor is. Increasing the sensitivity will allow you to create wellexposed pictures in low-light scenarios, but it will also amplify background noise, making the images appear more ‘grainy’. Digital imaging sensor technology and low-light performance is advancing with every camera model, producing ever-cleaner results at higher ISO values. Typically the lowest ISO value on most cameras is 50 or 100, to produce the best image quality.