Photography Fundamentals by Blueflash

Photography Fundamentals A handbook for understanding your camera and taking better pictures

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Welcome Whether you just got your first camera or you’ve had a DSLR slung around your neck for years, this information should help you gain a better understanding of how that camera does its thing. In turn, your solid understanding of what’s going on inside that little black box will enable you to have more control over your photographs. The end result is better pictures. That’s what we’re all after, right?!

We want you to get off of the automatic mode. Take control of what’s going on and use that control to produce more artistic and creative images. Once you read through and grasp the information in this guide, you should be able to look at a photo that you’ve taken and understand why it’s too dark, too blurry, too grainy, the wrong color, etc…

Once you know that, you can fix it! Understanding is the key to taking better pictures. Have we mentioned that yet?

If you have any questions about anything please feel free to get in touch with us and ask. You can find us a few different ways: Website: http://www.blueflashphotography.com Facebook: Blueflash Photography (http://www.facebook.com/blueflashphotography) Instagram: @blueflashphoto Blog: http://www.blueflashphotography.com/blog Twitter: @blueflashphoto Email: matt@blueflashphotography.com

Blueflash is a full service photography and cinematography studio. We also offer the Bluecube (our custom designed and built photobooth), wireless LED uplighting, and full event design, planning, and coordination.

Further Learning For those of you who want to get deeper into the world of photography, we offer one-on-one training for a whole range of topics. Some examples are lighting, post-production, advanced camera fundamentals, business 101 for photographers, and more. Just ask and we can set up something that works for you!

Enjoy the guide!

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Shutter Speed The shutter of the camera is what opens and closes when you take a picture. The shutter is can be a “leaf shutter”, a “curtain” type, or electronic depending on the camera, but it's effect on the exposure of a picture remains the same. Shutter speed is measured in seconds, although more commonly in fractions of a second. The shutter speed can affect a few things in a photo, but in isolation its main impact is on the 'fluidity' of the picture. The easiest way to illustrate this is with some examples.

This first photo (above) is taken with a shutter speed of 1/80 of a second, f/4, ISO 1000. For now we are only interested in the shutter speed parameter. Notice how the water looks pretty defined as does my hand.

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This second photo was taken of the same water scene, but with a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds, f/14, and ISO 200. The same flow of water now looks more fluid and my hand looks like a blurry mess.

What's going on? Why does it do that? When the shutter snaps quickly (generally anything faster than 1/100 second) you typically get a clean picture that doesn't have any blur. Most things don't move very much in 1/100 second. When you shoot with a shutter speed down in the range of about 1/30 second all the way down to multiple seconds, you are essentially taking a video that keeps overlapping onto the same photo. Lots of things can move in a few seconds‌ even your great aunt Beatrice. As long as the shutter is open, it's letting light in to hit the sensor and recording it.

"Matt, my point-and-shoot camera pictures keep coming out blurry and i don't know what's going on, plus I don't care about all this technical stuff. How do i fix it?" Chances are that your shutter speed is too slow. The simplest way to remedy that problem is by turning your flash on. Your shutter speed can then be increased up to 1/250 and the blast of light will freeze your subject for you. This is a bit of a cheat as you'll see a little later. First we need to learn about a few other things before we can understand why.

Summary The shutter allows the light into the camera. Controlling how long it is open for affects how much light is collected as well as how much motion is captured.

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Aperture Ever wonder how professional photographers get shots with the person in focus and everything else encapsulated in a dreamy haze? it doesn't require any Photoshop magic, but rather just a little understanding of aperture.

There is a part of the lens that is close to the lens/body junction, basically a hole, whose function is to let light through when a photo is taken. the amount that the hole opens is called the aperture.

Aperture is measured on a numeric scale where a smaller number indicates a larger opening on the lens. The aperture control can be thought of as your eyelid and how much you open it. The wider you open it, the more light comes in. When it's real sunny, you squint. Why? To reduce the amount of light intake. Cameras are very similar except they can't wear sunglasses.

In isolation, the aperture's main influence on your photo will be the depth-of-field. Here's a couple examples to explain depth of field. This first picture has an aperture of 1.8 (referred to as f/1.8) while the second photo is taken at f11. The focus point of both photos is the garlic clove.

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Notice how at f1.8, the objects in front of and behind the garlic get blurrier the further away they are.

At f11, everything in the picture is relatively clear even though the focus point in both photos was the same.

The other thing that aperture has a big influence on is how quickly it can get enough light into the sensor to correctly expose a photo. You can think of this like holding a Poland Springs bottle out in the rain as compared to holding a trash barrel out in the same rain storm. Which will collect more water more quickly? The trash can. That's a larger aperture (remember - lower number, like our f/1.8 photo).

Summary - Smaller aperture, bigger opening, more light, shallow depth-of-field - Larger aperture, smaller opening, less light, deeper depth-of-field

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ISO The term ISO hails back from the hey-day of film. Film had speed ratings which were measured in ISO numbers. The speed of the film was actually referring to how sensitive it was to light. The higher the number, the more sensitive the film, the more quickly it could get enough light to expose properly which would allow you to shoot in low-light with faster shutter speeds. Conversely, a low ISO number like 100 would be pretty insensitive to light. This would be the stuff you'd load into your camera if you were shooting outdoors on a bright sunny day.

We're not using film so why do we care? We still care because digital cameras also have an ISO setting. Digital cameras have a "sensor" that captures the image rather than using a roll of film. The sensor gets blasted with photons of light when the shutter opens and it records the intensities of the photons on each tiny subsection (these subsections of the sensor are called pixels). The ISO parameter controls the sensitivity of the sensor, the parallel of the film speed in analog world.

Still wondering why you should care? ISO plays a direct role in the amount of "noise" your photo has. Generally the higher the ISO, the more noise will be introduced into your photo. Noise most typically shows up as “grain�, giving the picture a very gritty and undesirable look. In addition, at very high ISO levels there can be severe color degradation and other negative effects. Keep in mind that the better the camera/sensor, the more capable it will be at producing clean photos at higher ISOs. If you're shooting with an entry level DSLR, you probably will start seeing degradation once you pass ISO800. With a point and shoot you'd want to have it set to auto and let the camera calculate what it needs. The exception to this rule is if the camera keeps producing poor quality photos because the flash is off, there's not enough light, and the only option it has is to jack up the ISO so it has a prayer of exposing the picture properly. In this case you'd probably want to enable flash so the ISO can be reduced.

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Here's an example of a clean image shot with ISO200

Here's an example of a noisy image shot with ISO6400

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The easiest place to see the differences in the example photos is on the camera body itself and a little bit on the table. You’ll notice the lens cap appear speckled in the high ISO photo. That is the noise that gets introduced at high sensitivity. Detail is lost and colors start to be misrepresented.

Overall tonality of the photos changes, too. As the photos get enlarged more and more these differences become much more obvious.

Summary ISO determines the sensitivity of the digital sensor. The higher the number, the more sensitive it is to light. The tradeoff is that noise increases with ISO.

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White Balance Sometimes things don't quite look right in a photo. The people look a little too orange or the lights look way too blue. It didn't look like that in real life, so why's the camera doing that? The white balance is incorrect. The human brain does an amazing job of figuring out what a neutral white is. It then figures out what all the other colors should look like. The result? Everything always looks as it should. Cameras, on the other hand, have to make a decision as to what neutral white is.

Sometimes it's wrong.

The camera does its best to pick what it thinks is a neutral grey tone in the picture. Once it determines that, it bases all of the other colors off of that grey tone. If the camera picks the wrong color for its neutral grey then your colors will get skewed. Here's the same photo with different extreme white balances: Color temperature : 2450K

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Color temperature : 10100 K

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Notice the labels on the pictures. White balance is measured on a Kelvin scale which is a temperature. To get real nerdy, the number represents the temperature of a black body radiator when it emits certain colors. It’s the same temperature scale on the boxes of fluorescent light bulbs at the hardware store. The higher the temperature, the cooler the color (blue and greenish hues).

Conversely, the lower the temperature, the warmer the color appears (red and orange hues). A textbook photo has a perfectly balanced white point for true color reproduction.

You may be wondering why he examples above show a cooler looking picture with the lower temperature and a warmer looking picture with the higher temperature. Didn’t we just say it was the opposite? It is. It’s a little bit confusing. The temperatures listed before each example are what the camera is set to (or what the color temperature is set to in post production). That number is what we are telling the camera or computer where the neutral grey is. Think about it, scratch your head, and then think about it some more.

You can purposefully alter the white balance from its neutral point to emphasize something in the photo that you feel is there. Color is a strong tool because it can evoke different emotions and feelings. Subtle differences can make a big impact. Take the next three photos for example. Same photos, different white balances. Do you see and feel the difference?

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Color temperature : 2850K

Color temperature : 4550K

Color temperature : 9900K

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There are different ways you can control the white balance in your photos. You can set the camera to auto white balance (letting it figure out what it thinks it is on its own), set it to a scene (tungsten, cloudy, sunny, etc‌), or set it completely manually (enter the temperature in Kelvin).

The last of the three methods allow for the most precise and reliable control and is what we recommend. You can set the temperature as well as the tint (green/pink adjustment) which is the second component of white balance.

Even some point and shoots will allow you to set these parameters now. Almost all DSLR cameras let you directly choose the color temperature.

A quick note – white balance can be changed in post-processing. If your camera is saving the photos as JPGs then you will lose image quality by adjusting the white balance in post. Raw shooting allows for non-destructive white balance adjustment.

Summary White balance refers to how the camera determines what is a neutral tone. A proper white balance makes whites appear white and all the other colors get represented as they look in real life.

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Resolution What is a megapixel anyway? Pixel is short for "picture element". It's basically a dot. A megapixel is 1,000,000 pixels. actually it's 1,048,576 pixels (2 to the 20th power), but who's counting? A really low resolution picture might be 800 pixels by 600 pixels. Multiply those together and that gives you the number: 480,000 pixels, or roughly a half of a megapixel.

Here's some near useless math for those that care: Let's keep with the standard aspect ratio of a typical photo which is 3:2 (300 over 200 gives a 3 to 2 aspect ratio). At 10 megapixels you have (10 (megapixels) * 1,048,576 (pixels in a megapixel) = 10,485,760 total pixels). Think of it like a rectangle with a 3:2 aspect ratio and you get two equations: 1) Area (in megapixels) = X * Y 2) 3/2 = Y/X Take equation 1 and solve for X 3) X = Area/Y Sub X into equation 2 4) 3/2 = Y/(Area/Y) Solve equation 4 for Y 5) Y = sqrt((3*Area)/2) Sub in megapixels into Area and solve for Y 6) Y = sqrt((3 * 10,485,760)/2) 7) Y = 3966 (rounded to nearest whole number) Sub Y into equation 3 to get 8) X = 10,485,760 / 3966 9) X = 2644 We have now found X and Y, our two dimensions of our photo. It tells us that a 10 megapixel shot at a 3:2 aspect ratio will give us a photo with the dimensions of 2644 by 3966. It’s a few pixels off because of our rounding, but hopefully that will help you understand what all the numbers mean and where they come from.

This comes into important play when trying to figure out how large of a print you can make from a particular file. If the printing requirements are 150 DPI (dots per inch), then you simply divide your two dimensions by DPI and that will give you that maximum amount of inches you can print the photo. For example, our above photo at 150 DPI would yield the following: www.blueflashphotography.com

X = 2644 DPI = 150 Maximum print size in X dimension = X / DPI = 2644 / 150 = 17.6 inches Y = 3966 DPI = 150 Maximum print size in Y dimension = Y / DPI = 3966 / 150 = 26.4 inches Therefore you wouldn’t want to enlarge the photo any more than 17.6” x 26.4”. Once you do exceed that size you’ll start to get image degradation because you don’t have enough pixels to represent the image that large.

Before you start drooling over the pixel count on some new camera that you want, be warned you that more is not always better. The sensor in the camera is only so big and the pixels can only be so small. In order to fit more pixels onto the sensor they have to get squeezed way closer together to use every bit of sensor real estate available; the result is that the pixel density increases. On DSLR cameras and probably even some point-and-shoots, the pixel density is listed in the tech specs.

Take a look at it when you're doing your comparisons - it's a much ignored but important camera specification.

Summary Resolution is the total amount of pixels your camera can capture and output. It is usually hyped up in marketing and advertising as the only important camera specification. It actually is one of the least important in most situations. Don't be fooled. Dynamic range trumps resolution any day of the week. More on that later.

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Focal Length The focal length most closely equivalent to that of the human eye is about 50mm. That's not to be confused with the 35mm of '35mm camera', which is referring to the film size. Those are two different things measured with the same unit (millimeters). What the 50mm focal length means to us is that when you put the camera up to your eye, the image you see won't appear zoomed in or out but rather it will look just about what it does without the camera.

There's more to life than 50mm. Lenses come in two main flavors - prime and variable. Variable lenses allow you to change the focal length. A common kit lens with entry level DSLR cameras is an 18-55mm. That means you can use the lens at any focal length between 18mm (considered wide angle) all the way up to 55mm, which will appear just a little bit zoomed in compared to the naked eye. Variable lenses are nice for obvious reasons, allowing you to very quickly adjust your focal length on the fly without swapping lenses. Your other choice is a prime lens which has a fixed focal length. While primes don't afford you the luxury of quick focal length changes, they do have some advantages. There are three main advantages to primes: They are usually much sharper than variable lenses, they typically weigh less, and they often afford you better aperture for less money than a variable or zoom lens.

Here's an example to show the difference between a shot from the same distance at 80mm and a shot at 200mm.

80mm photograph:

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200mm photograph:

Camera lenses are often internally made up of multiple pieces of glass. A prime lens has all of its glass in fixed positions. A variable lens achieves different focal lengths by allowing you to move certain pieces of glass closer together and further apart from one another (usually done by turning the outside housing of the lens clockwise and counter-clockwise). The sacrifice of the allowance of motion in the glass is that the alignment is not quite as precise as the prime lens. This reduces the sharpness of the lens. The added weight of a variable lens is often due to the extra glass necessary to make adjustments.

That’s not to say you cannot have a sharp variable/zoom lens. It just means that you’re going to pay for it handsomely!

Summary: Focal length directly affects how “zoomed in” or “zoomed out” the camera/lens is. The larger the number, the more “zoomed in” the picture is. The opposite is also true.

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Flash A camera flash lets off an extremely intense and very short burst of light. If you have a good enough DSLR, enough light, a fast enough lens and understand the other camera fundamentals, then you should be able to take a photo of motion and freeze it without using flash in most cases. Otherwise, flash might be your only option. It can also be used artistically once it’s understood very well.

There are some drawbacks. One common flash issue is that it causes redeye. Redeye is a reflection of the back of your eye, specifically the blood vessels on the retina, when hit with direct and intense light. The way to avoid this is to not fire your flash directly into a face from straight on. Instead you can angle it elsewhere or bounce it off of a ceiling or wall. If you have a DSLR with a speedlight (one of those add-on flashes stuck to the top of the camera) then you can easily modify the direction of the flash. Point it at about a 60 degree angle toward the ceiling and you'll get a nice bounce to illuminate your subject and get rid of redeye. If you have a speedlight, do a lot of experimenting with bounce angles. You'll be surprised to see the differences in the various angles.

Note that while bouncing flash that the surface you’re bouncing the light of of needs to be considered. If you bounce it off of a bright green wall, the light will pick up that color and your image will have a green cast. Be careful and be aware of your surroundings.

Another drawback to direct flash is that it often looks harsh. A “soft” quality light is usually desirable. One easy way to soften the light is to use a diffuser. You can buy one or even use a piece of wax paper or tissue paper to experiment. You want to have some space between your light source and the diffusion material. You also want to have the material be larger than your light source. The idea is to scatter the light which will soften shadows and allow the light to wrap around your subject a little better.

External speedlights allow you to change the intensity of the flash. This is handy if you want to use flash but not have it overpower the photo. This can allow you to obtain subtle highlights without it looking unnatural. Here's a couple photos that show the difference between direct flash and bounced flash. Notice how the direct flash photo has underexposed areas around where the flash directly hit and the indirect flash photo doesn't.

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Direct Flash

Bounced Flash

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There are usually two main flash modes available. One is front curtain and the other is rear curtain.

What it controls is if the flash fires right after the shutter opens or right before the shutter closes.

The easiest way understand the effects of this is to see it. Both of the shots were taken with a 2 second shutter speed while panning the camera from the right to the left. Again, the camera is moving in the same direction for both pictures. This is important to understand.

Front Curtain

Rear Curtain

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What's going on? A lot. The floor and candle (the part without the flame) do not emit any light on their own. They get captured when the flash fires. The flame is emitting light, essentially acting like a light source in the photo and because of that is captured throughout the two seconds.

When the flash fires at the beginning of the shot, the flame lags behind the candle. When it fires at the end of the shot, it captured the flame already and ends the shot with the candle.

Summary Flash is a complex topic and there’s much, much more to it than presented here. This is just the extreme basics. Light modifiers, light source sizes, distance of light, quality of light, color of light, intensity of light, balancing of light, and direction of light are all hugely important in order to create photographs properly with artificial light.

Experiment and try to understand what’s happening and why. One of the best ways to get comfortable with flash is to just practice, but practice thoughtfully.

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Dynamic Range This isn't anything you can control, but it's worth mentioning because it plays a key role in your picture quality. Every camera has a different amount of dynamic range. No camera is any match for the two eyes that God gave us. Dynamic range is the range of intensities the camera can collect in a photo, from the darkest dark to the brightest bright. The best camera can only see about 75% of the amount of dynamic range that the human eye can. They are getting closer but they’re not quite all the way there yet. This is why when you snap a picture of a bedroom with a window during the day you either get the room exposed properly and the window totally blown out, or you get the window exposed properly and the bedroom very dark.

The more you shoot, the more you learn to see how your camera sees. When you get a good feel for that you are better able to compose photos. You learn to stay away from extremely high contrast situations because you know your camera will either lose the darks or lose the brights. Sometimes you don't have any other option in which case you would typically expose for your subject and let the environment do whatever it's going to do.

This is definitely something that comes with practice. Pay attention to how photos look different in camera than how they did to your eye. Make a mental inventory of it as you shoot and you'll eventually be able to predict what will happen when you take a picture.

Summary: Go take pictures!

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