We, at SACamera, have put together what we think is the most basic way of explaining the most important camera settings to get your snapping happy. This very basic mini-lesson is aimed at beginners. If you know very little (or nothing at all) about cameras – take some time to read through this and by the end of it you will be able to partake in those dinner conversations about how your photographer friend captured that perfect shot and all of those intense looking settings will become a lot less intimidating…

Here’s what you are going to learn:
What is ISO? And How does it affect your picture?
What is Aperture and what does it do?
What is metering? Centre-weighted, partial, evaluative…

In photography, the most important thing to be aware of at all times is LIGHT. A photograph is, very simply put, a chemical process in which LIGHT is exposed to a sensor on your camera and is registered as a picture.
All of the settings we discuss below are determined by how much light is available to you at the time of taking your photograph.

So, let’s start with ISO!
ISO measures how sensitive the image sensor on your camera is to LIGHT. The higher your ISO number, the more sensitive your camera will be. The lower the ISO number, the less sensitive it will be.

For example. If you are outside; it’s a bright sunny day and you are taking pictures of your friends and family at a picnic in the garden. There is plenty of light in your surroundings, so you will set your camera to a lower ISO. Let’s say your camera has an ISO range of between 400 and 1600, like the Canon I am playing with. You would set your ISO to 400 as this is going to make the camera less sensitive to light, so the camera will not have all of its light sensors on full alert which would cause a complete over exposure on your picture.

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The pictures of Kitty: The picture on the Right shows an image where the ISO setting was correct for shooting ourdoors in bright light. The picture on the Left is overexposed because the ISO was set too high.

Later in the day, after your picnic, you move indoors to have some cocktails once the sun has set. You now need to turn your ISO to a much higher setting as there isn’t a lot of light around and the camera has to be on full alert capturing every bit of light it can from the surroundings.

If you try and take a picture in a badly lit room with your ISO on 400, you are telling the camera not to worry about finding the light because there is plenty of it, but there isn’t. The result will be a very dark image and you most likely won’t be able to identify anything in it.

Think of the ISO settings in this way. The higher the ISO number, the more “awake” the camera is and it will do its best to collect as much light as possible. The lower the ISO number, the less work the camera has to put into finding light as there is an abundance of it in the environment you are shooting in already.

IMPORTANT NOTE: the higher your ISO setting, the more grainy your image may be, just keep that in mind when opting to lighten your image with ISO instead of using a flash….now you are thinking, but why would I opt to use ISO instead of a flash if it makes the image grainy? Some concerts, animal zones and various functions don’t allow the use of flash photography :] Now you know how to work around that!

Aperture…
Aperture is controlled in your camera by a device called a diaphragm. Each different aperture setting is named an F-STOP. It looks something like this on your camera display: F5.6 or F22 etc

The higher the number, the SMALLER the aperture. F5.6 would be a Large aperture and F22 would be much Smaller.
See the picture below with the diaphragm at different F-stop settings:
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But what does it all MEAN??
in a nut shell, if you are focusing on something small, right in front of you, like a bug on a leaf, you want the camera to pay special attention to keeping that bug in focus and you are not too worried about the background…so you want your aperture number to be small (F5) for a wider opening.

If your are taking a picture of a field of flowers, you want the camera to focus on everything and therefore would have a higher F-stop (F18 - F22 etc)

Aperture also effects how much light comes into your camera. A wide open aperature acts like a wide open door and lets in a lot of light (great for night time shots) a smaller aperture opening will only let in a small amount of light (great for bright day time shots when you don’t want to over expose your photo).

That pretty much sums aperture up…even though it starts out sounding a little daunting with F5.6, F-Stops and Diaphragms….its really easy to understand and will greatly impact the results of your images.

That brings us to METERING.
OK, so you are on a beach and you want to take a picture of your friend…you point the camera at her… lets pause and talk about what the camera is seeing at this moment in time because unless you are on the right Metering Setting you are giving your camera a headache with contradictory information.

You have bright, white, glaring sand, silver water reflecting the sun’s rays and of course your friend framed in all of this dazzling brightness.

You camera, on the incorrect Metering setting, looks at the sand and adjusts its “light Reading” in order to take the picture without over exposing the sand and the water…but now your friend turns into a dark silhouette against a perfect background!

Here’s what metering does.
The different metering settings will tell your camera which PART of the picture to take the light reading from. Do you want the camera to set its settings according to the entire scene (like the entire field of flowers), or only a smaller portion (like your friends face and body on the beach) of the scene.

Each Metering Setting on your camera will give you a different option for the portion of the scene the camera should ‘read’ from.

SPOT METERING: this setting will tell the camera to take its reading from a very small section of the scene, maybe 5% of the entire picture.

PARTIAL METERING: The camera will ‘read’ from about 15% of the frame.

CENTER_WEIGHTED METERING: the camera will ‘read’ from around 70% of the centre of the frame.

AVERAGE METERING: The camera will take its reading from the scene as a whole and not focus on any particular point.

For different camera makes, the names of the Metering options may vary, but they have the same result and function.

And so concludes our little crash course for all those (now not so foreign looking) settings on your LCD!
We hope this helped you to feel more confident about taking your camera off Manual Mode ;]