Exposure.

The exposure is what can make or break a photograph. If you get the exposure right you will produce amazing photographs. Getting the wrong exposure may result in underexposed or overexposed photographs.

What is exposure?

It is simply how much light is exposed to the image sensor in a digital camera or the film in a film camera. The exposure is the total amount of light that is made up of three elements.

There are 3 elements of exposure:

• Shutter speed: how long the shutter is open for.

• Aperture: the size of the opening in the lens.

• ISO: the measure, of the image sensors, sensitivity to light.

It has to be said that mastering the art of the right exposure does take some time and practice. Even very experienced photographers tweak and change their settings when the are taking photographs.

When you change one of the elements of exposure it will also have some effect on other aspects of your photograph.

• Changing shutter speed = change in the way your camera captures movement.

• Changing aperture = change in the depth of field of the photograph

• Changing ISO = change the noise/graininess of your photograph.

Now, don't panic! The thought of setting your exposure may sound a bit scary. The great thing with using a digital camera is that you can experiment, make mistakes, learn and not worry about wasting film!

Most digital cameras have settings that help you with exposure, allowing you to change on on the exposure elements and then the camera will set the others for you.

These semi automatic settings are usually called, aperture priority(allows you to set the aperture) and shutter priority(allows you to set the shutter speed.) These settings are great if you want to change the aperture to gain a different depth of field but your not sure what the correct shutter speed is.

Learning more about the three elements of exposure will help you get to grips with using your camera out of auto setting.

Shutter speed

Aperture

ISO

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