The teacher in me - A photo lesson

Even though I'm not in the classroom right now, I still think that teaching is a big part of who I am. I can't help it. I'm just one of those people that was wired for teaching. I'm not, however, a do-it-yourself student. I really can't stand having to read and self teach. I'm so auditory--sit me in a classroom, have someone explain something, and I'll have it in no time. Having to learn from just reading--blech.

That's where I've been recently. I'm trying to learn more about my camera and photography in general. I've got a nice camera that takes nice pictures in auto, but it can do better--if I can. Getting out of auto mode and into manual. So, at the very least, that means that I need to understand some basic photography concepts. I've been reading through a couple of different books and sites online. Exposure, aperture, shutter speed, wah, wah, wah-wah (think Charlie Brown). I kept reading and I could tell you all the definitions, but COULD NOT for the life of me really grasp the relationship between them all. Then, I was reading one of Pioneer Woman's tutorials and she mentioned something about getting your eyes dilated. FINALLY! She made the correlation that clarified the whole mess for me. From that one statement I was able to relate all of this to something in my sphere of understanding. (Eyeballs! If I think about eyeballs, it all makes sense!

As soon as everything started making sense in my head, I started thinking about how I would have explained it to me so that it would have made sense sooner. And that's where I'm going with this post. There's an old adage that says if you really want to understand something, teach it. So, I'm satisfying two things at once - wanting to really understand and getting out that teaching urge. Lauren (and anyone else that knows anything about photography) step in if I get something wrong!!

Here goes my attempt at a quick lesson on exposure, aperture, and shutter speed.

Exposure
A big focus with photography is getting "correct" exposure. (I've discovered there is a lot of debate about what that really is. I'm just going with the basic idea of what it is.) Look at something. Anything. Go ahead. I'll wait. Okay, now acheiving "correct" exposure is getting a picture to look as closely as possible to what you saw with your own two eyeballs. An over-exposed photo is one that has so much light that things get washed out. An under-exposed picture is one that didn't get enough light is too dark. Why does that happen? Because of aperture and shutter speed.

Aperture
Pictures are all about light and how that light reacts with the lens in your camera. It's really pretty similar to how your eyeballs work. Aperture itself is the opening in the lens that lets light in. By adjusting the aperature, you are changing the amount of light that gets into the camera. With a tiny aperture, you get a really crisp picture. With a wide open aperture, on the other hand, you only get a really small area in focus.

Your eyeballs work the same way. You have pupils (the black thing in the middle of your eye) that get bigger and smaller to change the amount of light that comes in. Think about the last time you went to the eye doctor and got your eyes dilated (thank you PW for this great example!). What did the world around you look like? A blurry mess? Right answer! The more dilated your eyes get, the more wonky your peripheral vision gets. All the junk on the outside edges get blurred. So when you see pictures where the person in the middle is nice and clear and the stuff around the outside (corn, maybe?) is blurred, your camera had it's pupil (aperture) dilated (wide open).

The opposite is true, too. What do you do when you are looking at something that is blurry? You squint? Right answer again. We squint our eyes to try to bring stuff into focus. If you want a picture where everything is really crisp and clear, you need to tell your camera to squint (go to a tiny aperture).

The big thing about aperture that kept throwing me was the whole numbering system. Aperture is measured in f/ stops. Like f/1.8 or f/22. If you want to tell your camera to squint (make its aperture smaller) you have to tell it to use a HIGHER number like f/ 22. If you want to tell it to dilate its eyes, you have to use a LOWER number like f/1.8. BACKWARDS. Or so it seems. Really, those numbers are fractions 1/1.8 and 1/22 so the numbering system actually makes sense. But apparently the cool thing to do was drop the numerator in an attempt to confuse the rest of us. Stupid lazy people.

Shutter Speed
This one is pretty simple to understand. Shutter speed is how long your camera's eye (I mean shutter) opens up to take the picture. Your camera will record all the motion that took place while the shutter was open. That's why sometimes if you are taking a picture of, say, someone waving their hands, their hands are a blurry mess. If something is moving fast and you want it to be clear, you have to use a shutter speed that's just as fast. If you want "blur" to show the motion (think of the pictures of cars on the highway where the lights are in long streaks), you would slow the shutter speed down so the camera has it's eye open long enough to see the movement.

So how does it all fit together?
This is were I was really, really getting lost. But when I thought about in relation to eyeballs, it started to make sense. Your aperture and shutter speed have to be in sync with each other to get a "correctly" exposed picture. You're probably not going to want to use a wide open aperture and a slow shutter speed. Why? If you remember, a wide open aperture is like having your eyes dilated (again, thanks PW). If you walk out into the bright sunlight with your eyes dilated, you get blinded by the light. Using a larger aperture and a slow shutter speed does the same thing to your camera (causing an over-exposed photo). Instead, when you walk out in the sunlight with dilated eyes, your body's instinct is to close your eyes to prevent that. To prevent an over-exposed photo, you need to tell your camera "Quick, close your eyes so you don't get blinded!" by using a fast shutter speed.

Conversely, when you've been out in the sun for a long time and walk in the dark house, everything is dark and funny looking. That's because your pupils are constricted (really small) and you're not getting enough light in them. When you use a tiny aperture, your camera's eye is constricted and thus not getting a lot of light (causing an under-exposed photo). So if you want to get a "correct" exposure (and not that funky darkness that you get when you walk in from the sun) you need to tell it to keep it's eye open and use a longer shutter speed.

There's a lot of practice that goes along with learning when to use which settings. From everything I've read, it's good to start out by using a priority mode on your camera where you pick either aperture or shutter speed and let your camera figure out the other (hooray for technology that is smarter than me!). That's kinda where I am. Somewhere in between trying aperture priority mode (This is best for portraits. Shutter priority seems better for sports or time lapse stuff.) and playing with full manual. And with that, I have (almost) completely exhausted what I know.

I figure I'll keep doing posts like these as I learn new things. I don't know if anyone will read them, but typing this out has helped me a bunch. And it did satisfy both the teaching bug and helping my understanding.

If you did read it, did it make sense? Are you lost? Thoughts? Do you actually think at all? (Just kidding. Just wanted to see if you were actually still reading.) Congratulations if you've read this far and your brain hasn't melted or exploded. The first time I read about all of this stuff I think my ears started bleeding from the frustration. This is really a lot of work to go through in order to take good photos of my kids. Then again, if they aren't worth a lot of hard work, what is?