1. IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi! My name is Ben Long, and welcome to
"Foundations of Photography: Exposure."
| | 00:09 | I'm standing out here in this
spectacular location. I've got my camera with me.
| | 00:13 | The beauty of the modern digital
camera is that whether you shoot with a
| | 00:15 | digital SLR, a point-and-shoot or a
cell phone camera, your digital camera can
| | 00:19 | make all of the critical exposure
and image quality decisions for you.
| | 00:23 | But even the best auto system in the
world has no way of knowing what image it
| | 00:27 | is that you have in mind when you take a shot.
| | 00:29 | For example, if you are shooting a
fast-moving subject, your camera can't decide
| | 00:33 | on its own whether that
subject should be frozen or blurred.
| | 00:37 | Similarly, when you are shooting a
portrait, your digital camera can't decide on
| | 00:40 | its own whether the background
should be blurred out or rendered sharp.
| | 00:44 | Or maybe you are tired of seeing a
scene like this, but coming home with a
| | 00:49 | picture like this. To get the image
that you want, you have to override your
| | 00:53 | camera's decision-making process,
and the key to knowing how to take control of
| | 00:57 | your camera is an understanding of exposure.
| | 00:59 | So, despite the mammoth level of 21st
century technology in your camera, you
| | 01:04 | still need to understand the basics of
exposure theory that all photographers a
| | 01:08 | hundred years ago had to learn.
| | 01:10 | Because even though your camera has
substantially more computing power than the
| | 01:13 | Apollo Astronauts took to the moon,
its still doesn't necessarily have taste.
| | 01:19 | Learning exposure theory doesn't
mean that you are going to abandon the
| | 01:22 | automatic features of your camera.
| | 01:24 | I am a big fan of auto modes.
| | 01:25 | I use them regularly.
| | 01:26 | Having an understanding of exposure
theory is going to help you understand when
| | 01:31 | you need to override your automatic settings.
| | 01:33 | Light and shadow are the building
blocks of good images, and as you learn more
| | 01:37 | about how to control light and tone, you
will begin to recognize potential shots
| | 01:41 | that you may not be noticing now.
| | 01:43 | This course is for anyone with a
digital camera; however, you will get more out
| | 01:46 | of it if you have more
manual controls on your camera.
| | 01:49 | Your exposure education kicks off in
the next lesson with a discussion of what
| | 01:53 | exactly we mean by "exposure."
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| What is exposure?| 00:00 | When you are shooting, it is very easy
to focus all of your attention on your
| | 00:04 | subject, and how you want to frame it.
| | 00:06 | After all, your subject is what
makes your photo, right? Only partly.
| | 00:11 | People often ask me, what do you like to shoot?
| | 00:13 | For a while this question really
confused me, until I realized that the
| | 00:16 | answer for me is light.
| | 00:19 | I like to shoot nice light. It doesn't
even necessarily matter what that light
| | 00:23 | is bouncing off of.
| | 00:25 | Light creates texture.
| | 00:27 | Light and shadow together can create a
sense of depth in your scene, or allow
| | 00:31 | you to control the viewer's eye, and
controlling the viewer's eye is the
| | 00:35 | essence of composition.
| | 00:36 | There is no photography without light,
and the secret to controlling light is to
| | 00:42 | understand exposure.
| | 00:44 | Even if you are not well-versed in the
history of photography, you have probably
| | 00:47 | seen a lot of movies.
| | 00:49 | Think about the strong shadows in a
great film noire movie--so named because the
| | 00:54 | images had lots of war or black in them.
| | 00:58 | Or think of the rich colors and the
dramatic lighting as the hero rides off into
| | 01:02 | the sunset in the classic western.
| | 01:04 | These are all moods and atmospheres that
are created through lighting and exposure.
| | 01:09 | Movies are a photographic process,
after all, and cinematographers have to know
| | 01:13 | the same exposure theory
that we photographers do.
| | 01:17 | So what exactly is exposure?
| | 01:21 | Let's go outside for a minute.
| | 01:25 | You have probably experienced this. Ah!
| | 01:28 | You step outside, and it's too
bright until your eyes adjust.
| | 01:32 | Now you probably also experienced this.
| | 01:36 | I step into a dark room, and I can't see
anything until my eyes adjust. That's exposure.
| | 01:44 | The pupil in my eyes, the black part, is
an iris that can open and close to let
| | 01:49 | in more or less light.
| | 01:51 | That takes a certain amount of
light for me to be able to see.
| | 01:54 | So when I am in a dark room, my pupils
are opened very wide to let in enough
| | 01:58 | light for me to see.
| | 02:00 | When I stepped outside, my pupils were
still opened very wide, so wide that I
| | 02:04 | couldn't see, because my
vision was overexposed.
| | 02:07 | All I could see was white.
| | 02:08 | Now, when that happens to you, you
may not think of it as seeing white,
| | 02:12 | probably because you are more focused on the
pain as the nerves in your eyes gets overloaded.
| | 02:17 | But to sum up, when I am in one
situation, my eyes need a particular setting.
| | 02:22 | When I take those same eyes into a
very different lighting situation, that
| | 02:26 | setting is no longer correct, and I can't see.
| | 02:29 | That may sound familiar to you, not
just because you have eyes, but because
| | 02:32 | that's how your camera works.
| | 02:34 | It needs different exposure settings,
depending on how bright or dark the
| | 02:37 | light in your scene is.
| | 02:39 | Like your eye, inside your camera's
lens there is an iris, or aperture, that can
| | 02:44 | be opened or closed to
let in more or less light.
| | 02:47 | But your camera has an additional mechanism
for controlling light, in the form of a shutter.
| | 02:51 | It's a little curtain that can be
opened and closed quickly or slowly to let
| | 02:55 | in more or less light.
| | 02:57 | And that's all exposure is,
controlling the amount of light that gets to the
| | 03:01 | image sensor in your camera.
| | 03:03 | Too much light, and your
image will be overexposed.
| | 03:07 | It will be too bright. Highlight
details will be lost to complete white.
| | 03:10 | Colors will be washed out. Too little light,
| | 03:13 | and your image will be underexposed.
| | 03:15 | It will be too dark.
| | 03:16 | Shadow details will be lost to complete
black. Tone and color will be dull and dingy.
| | 03:21 | Now, you might be wondering why your
camera has two mechanisms for controlling
| | 03:25 | light when your eye can get away with just one.
| | 03:28 | The answer to that is complicated,
and we will explore it in detail
| | 03:30 | throughout this course.
| | 03:31 | Right now, know that the practical
upshot of having two controls in your camera,
| | 03:36 | and the reason that you want to learn
more about them, is that they provide you a
| | 03:39 | tremendous creative possibilities.
| | 03:42 | So we learn exposure theory not just to
ensure that our images are neither too
| | 03:46 | bright nor too dark, but to expand
the creative palette that we have at our
| | 03:50 | disposal when we are shooting.
| | 03:51 | We are going to be learning a lot of
numbers, and concepts, and terms in this
| | 03:55 | course, but in the end your eye
and your lens are both optical devices,
| | 03:59 | so a lot of what we are going to learn
is going to feel familiar to you, because
| | 04:02 | you already have a lot of experience
with a pair of lenses and apertures that
| | 04:06 | you use every single day.
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| A word about camera brands| 00:00 | At the risk of sounding like a fortune
cookie, I want to remind everyone that
| | 00:03 | it is what you do with a camera that
makes a good picture, not what brand of
| | 00:06 | camera that you use.
| | 00:08 | You can take a great picture with any
camera, from a cell phone to a high-end SLR.
| | 00:12 | You can also take a complete lousy picture with
any camera from a cell phone to a high-end SLR.
| | 00:16 | Good photography comes from the
combination of crafts skills, knowing how to
| | 00:20 | reproduce tones and color in a
particular way, with an artistic eye that has
| | 00:24 | learned how to see photographically.
| | 00:26 | The type of camera you choose to use
can make some of those things easier, but
| | 00:30 | in the end, a good photograph is
usually the product of a good photographer.
| | 00:34 | There's sometimes luck in there
too, but we don't talk about that.
| | 00:37 | Now that's not to say that for certain
types of images high-end gear is not a
| | 00:41 | better way to go, or that for other
types of images only a grungy toy camera will
| | 00:45 | get the look and feel you want.
| | 00:47 | The point is that all cameras
have their strengths and weaknesses.
| | 00:50 | As a photographer, if you going to
learn take advantage of those strengths
| | 00:53 | work around the weaknesses, or find a
way to exploit those weaknesses, then you
| | 00:56 | can come home with good images.
| | 00:59 | I've been writing about digital
photography for various magazines since the mid
| | 01:02 | 90s, and I've had the great good
fortune to get to shoot with a lot of cameras.
| | 01:05 | And honestly, my opinion at this point
is that these days it's hard to buy a
| | 01:09 | digital camera that takes bad images.
| | 01:11 | This is especially true with SLRs,
Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Fuzzy, Pentax, Sony,
| | 01:16 | Panasonic, and others; these
cameras all yield great image quality.
| | 01:20 | In the end, image quality should
be the arbiter of camera choice.
| | 01:24 | So it's pretty safe to say that you're in good
shape with just about any SLR you can get today.
| | 01:29 | On the point-and-shoot end,
things are similarly rosy.
| | 01:31 | There are many point-and-shoot cameras
available today that yield image quality
| | 01:35 | and features that 35-millimeter
shooters can only dream of a few years ago.
| | 01:39 | So in the end a camera choice comes down
to personal preference and feature needs.
| | 01:43 | Every camera manufacturer has their own
idea of the best interface, and some of
| | 01:47 | those interfaces might make
more sense to you than others.
| | 01:50 | Similarly, different manufacturers pack
their cameras with different features.
| | 01:54 | Depending on the type of shooting you do,
one feature set might be more useful
| | 01:57 | to you than another.
| | 01:59 | In this course we'll be shooting with
a Canon camera, partly because it's a
| | 02:02 | great camera and partly because it
provide some technical features that we need
| | 02:06 | for the production of this video.
| | 02:08 | Because you can get great results from
just about any camera these days, and
| | 02:11 | because the theory we'll be covering
here is true for all cameras, we'll be
| | 02:14 | keeping this course camera-agnostic.
| | 02:16 | I am not going to talk about the
specific controls of my camera, and when I
| | 02:20 | introduce a new control, we'll give you
directions for what you need to look for
| | 02:23 | in your camera's manual.
| | 02:24 | So if you don't have a fancy SLR, don't worry!
| | 02:27 | That shouldn't stop you from being able
to follow everything in this course and
| | 02:30 | learn the fundamentals of exposure.
| | 02:32 | And if you don't have the same camera
that we're using here, don't worry.
| | 02:35 | The camera you've got is probably capable
of taking great pictures. The rest is
| | 02:39 | up to you.
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2. Exposure FundamentalsWhat is a camera?| 00:01 | Your digital camera is a marvel of 21st
century engineering, but if you could
| | 00:05 | somehow strip away all of the automatic
features that are just there to make it easier to use--
| | 00:10 | autofocus, autometering, the LCD
screen, the electronic shutter control, all
| | 00:15 | the rest of that stuff--you'd still be
left with a functional camera, because at
| | 00:19 | the most fundamental level, camera
technology has not changed since the 1850s.
| | 00:25 | All cameras are built on the same
fundamental chassis, a lightproof box with
| | 00:29 | a hole in the side.
| | 00:31 | One of the earliest such devices was
the camera obscura, a darkened room with
| | 00:35 | a hole in one wall.
| | 00:37 | Now, because of the physics of light,
a scene outside the room is projected
| | 00:41 | through the hole upside down
on the wall opposite the hole.
| | 00:44 | Of course, the camera is no good without
a way of recording an image, and with a
| | 00:48 | camera obscura, this was pretty easy.
| | 00:50 | You just stuck a Dutch master in the room
and he traced the projected image onto paper.
| | 00:55 | With the invention of chemical
photography, it became possible to shrink the
| | 00:58 | camera obscura down to the size of
a box, and that's what I have here.
| | 01:03 | This may look like just a cardboard box
| | 01:05 | that's been wrapped with black
electrical tape, but it's actually a camera.
| | 01:08 | This is a pinhole camera, which I made
by taking a cardboard box and wrapping it
| | 01:13 | with black electrical tape.
| | 01:15 | It's a completely lightproof box, and
in the back I've placed a piece of film.
| | 01:19 | This is one of the things that's kind
of a drag about a pinhole camera is that
| | 01:22 | you take a shot when you want to take
another, you got to open it up and put
| | 01:25 | another piece of film in the back.
| | 01:26 | On the front, I have a shutter just like
in my normal camera. It's a little flap that
| | 01:31 | I can open and close, and I've got a piece
of aluminum that I punched a pinhole into.
| | 01:36 | Now again, this is just
something to do with optics.
| | 01:39 | When I open the shutter, light gets
passed through that little pinhole and
| | 01:43 | projected upside down onto the back of the box.
| | 01:45 | So to make an exposure, I set the camera
up, and I have to try and guess where I
| | 01:51 | think the framing is, and I have to
calculate an exposure by hand, and once I
| | 01:57 | have done that, holding the camera very
still, I lift the shutter up, and I keep
| | 02:02 | it open for a long, long time.
| | 02:04 | The pinhole camera can be greatly
improved on with the addition of lenses and
| | 02:09 | all of the other automatic stuff
that you get in a normal camera.
| | 02:13 | The lens gives you shorter exposure times,
the ability to focus more light, the
| | 02:17 | ability to shoot in lower light.
| | 02:18 | This, of course, is how film cameras
have worked for the last 150 years.
| | 02:22 | With digital cameras, the piece of
light-sensitive film that's inside the camera
| | 02:26 | body was replaced with a light-
sensitive image sensor, and a lot of fancy gear
| | 02:30 | was stuck to the outside of the camera.
But the basics of exposure in your
| | 02:33 | digital camera remain exactly the same
as they do in a basic pinhole camera.
| | 02:38 | As you discovered earlier, exposure is
the process of controlling how much light
| | 02:42 | hits the image sensor, and your camera
has two mechanisms for controlling light:
| | 02:46 | the shutter and the aperture.
| | 02:47 | We're going to look at these in
much more detail throughout the rest of
| | 02:51 | this course.
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| The shutter| 00:00 | As we discussed earlier, your camera
has two mechanisms for controlling light:
| | 00:04 | it has a shutter and an aperture.
| | 00:06 | In this lesson, we're going
to take a look at the shutter.
| | 00:09 | A shutter is simply a mechanism that
allows you to control how long the image
| | 00:13 | sensor will be exposed to light, or
film, if you're shooting with a film camera.
| | 00:17 | Shutter speed is pretty intuitive.
| | 00:19 | As the shutter is open longer, more
light will strike the image sensor, and your
| | 00:23 | image will get brighter and brighter.
| | 00:24 | Let's go back to the pinhole
camera that we looked at earlier.
| | 00:28 | On the pinhole camera, this is the shutter,
| | 00:31 | this little door here that I opened.
| | 00:32 | When I open it light is able to pass
through the pinhole and expose the film
| | 00:36 | that's in the back of the camera.
| | 00:38 | So, to control shutter speed, I simply hold
this door open for a longer or shorter time.
| | 00:43 | Now because the sensor on your digital
camera is so sensitive, and because you've
| | 00:47 | got a lens to focus light onto it,
your digital camera needs much shorter
| | 00:51 | exposure times than this pinhole camera.
| | 00:54 | So short, in fact, that a door like
this one is impractical, because there is
| | 00:57 | just no way to swing it all the way
open and closed quickly enough to get the
| | 01:01 | short exposure times that
your digital camera needs.
| | 01:04 | So the shutter on your SLR, and on some point-
and-shoot cameras, is composed of two curtains.
| | 01:10 | When you press the shutter button, the
first curtain begins to slide open, and
| | 01:14 | then almost immediately the
second curtain begins to slide closed.
| | 01:17 | This creates a thin slip that passes in
front of the image sensor, exposing it to light.
| | 01:22 | I actually have a video of this
happening, but before we watch it, there is
| | 01:26 | something you need to understand about your SLR.
| | 01:29 | SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex,
meaning the camera has just one lens, and
| | 01:34 | this is it, the big lens
that's on the front of your camera.
| | 01:37 | Your image sensor is right back here.
| | 01:39 | So, it's a pretty straight shot
through the lens to the image sensor.
| | 01:43 | That part is pretty easy to understand.
| | 01:44 | The tricky thing about an SLR is that
your viewfinder is up here, above the
| | 01:49 | lens and above the image sensor.
| | 01:51 | And yet you're still able to look through
the same lens that is exposing the sensor.
| | 01:55 | How does that work?
| | 01:56 | It's all done with mirrors.
| | 01:57 | If I take the lens off, you'll see inside
that there is a mirror at an angle here.
| | 02:03 | So light comes through the lens,
bounces off that mirror, and goes straight up
| | 02:08 | into this part of the camera.
| | 02:10 | This is called the pentaprism.
| | 02:11 | It's a prism or in some cameras there
is series of additional mirrors that then
| | 02:15 | bounces the light straight
back out through the viewfinder.
| | 02:19 | So as long as this mirror is down, light
coming through the lens goes up into the
| | 02:23 | pentaprism and out the viewfinder, so
I can effectively look through the lens.
| | 02:27 | When I press the shutter button though,
the mirror flips up, so that now light is
| | 02:32 | going straight back, and the shutter happens.
| | 02:35 | Let's take a look at that in this video.
| | 02:37 | You can see the mirror flipping
open, a shutter opening and closing.
| | 02:41 | Let's take a look that again.
| | 02:44 | So you can watch that
mechanism on your own camera.
| | 02:47 | Just take the lens off the
camera and press the shutter button.
| | 02:50 | The shutter curtains will move far to
fast for you to see though, but you'll be
| | 02:53 | able to see them in mirror flip up and down.
| | 02:55 | Now point-and-shoot cameras don't always
have a physical shutter the way an SLR does.
| | 03:00 | Sometimes instead of physical shutter,
they just turn the sensor on and off for
| | 03:05 | the length of the desired exposure.
| | 03:07 | For different lighting situations you,
or your camera, will choose to have the
| | 03:11 | shutter open longer or shorter.
| | 03:13 | Now obviously in less light it will
need to be open longer, while in bright
| | 03:16 | situations you will want it open shorter.
| | 03:19 | Shutter speed is measured in seconds,
and because shutter speeds are usually
| | 03:22 | very quick your shutter speed will
almost always be a fraction of a second.
| | 03:26 | Your camera provides a range of
shutter speeds, and these are the standard
| | 03:29 | speeds that you will find out on all cameras.
| | 03:32 | Shutter speeds can also be very long.
| | 03:34 | If you're shooting in extreme dark,
you might have shutter speed that are
| | 03:37 | seconds, minutes, or even hours long.
| | 03:39 | So shutter speed is fairly
intuitive, as is its effect on your image.
| | 03:44 | But your shutter is not the only mechanism
for controlling how much light hits your sensor.
| | 03:47 | As you saw earlier, like your eye,
your camera also has an aperture.
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| The aperture| 00:00 | So you've seen how the shutter is used
by your camera to control the amount of
| | 00:03 | light that strikes the image sensor.
| | 00:05 | Now, let's take a look at the aperture.
| | 00:07 | The aperture sits in your lens, not your camera.
| | 00:10 | It's an iris composed of
interlocking metal blades. Here is a lens.
| | 00:14 | Watch what happens as the
iris is opened and closed.
| | 00:17 | The blades slide back and forth, and as
they do so, the hole in the middle can
| | 00:21 | be made bigger and smaller.
| | 00:23 | Obviously, a bigger hole allows more
light, while a smaller hole allows less.
| | 00:27 | More light means a brighter image.
| | 00:29 | The size of the hole is
specified using a measure called f-stop.
| | 00:33 | It's a number that refers to the
ratio of the size of the aperture to the
| | 00:37 | focal length of the lens. Now don't worry.
| | 00:39 | That's not something you need to really
know or think about when you're shooting.
| | 00:43 | All you need to know is that each specific
aperture size is denoted with an f-stop number.
| | 00:49 | So, you might have an aperture
that's f/4, or f/8, or f/11, and so on.
| | 00:53 | Now this next spits a little backwards.
| | 00:56 | Bigger numbers mean a smaller aperture,
| | 01:00 | so f/11 refers to a smaller aperture than f/4.
| | 01:04 | Now one way to think about this is that
the iris is stopping light, and a bigger
| | 01:09 | number means more stoppage,
which means a smaller hole.
| | 01:14 | Ultimately, as you work with aperture,
you're simply going to learn all this by rote.
| | 01:18 | When someone says f/16, you'll know that
they're referring to a very small aperture.
| | 01:22 | We're going to be covering apertures
and f-stop in great detail throughout the
| | 01:25 | rest of this course.
| | 01:26 | So if this all seems just a little
bit arcane right now, don't worry.
| | 01:29 | Just bear with me, and this will
get much more clear as we go along.
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| Exposure defined| 00:00 | Alrighty, let's recap.
| | 00:02 | You can speed up and slow down shutter speed
to let more or less light to the image sensor,
| | 00:09 | and you can open and close the aperture to
let more or less light to the image sensor.
| | 00:16 | Shutter speeds are measured in
fractions of a second, while apertures are
| | 00:19 | measured in ratios, called f-stops.
| | 00:22 | Together, these two numbers,
| | 00:24 | shutter speed and aperture
size, comprise an exposure setting.
| | 00:28 | A faster shutter speed allows less
light to pass to the image sensor, as does
| | 00:33 | a smaller aperture.
| | 00:34 | Now believe it or not, if you are
clear on this, you already understand the
| | 00:39 | fundamental components of basic exposure.
| | 00:42 | Really, this is it.
| | 00:43 | When you or your camera
manipulates exposure, all you are doing is
| | 00:47 | changing these two values:
| | 00:49 | shutter speed and aperture.
| | 00:51 | With them, you can control how much
light strikes the image sensor, and
| | 00:54 | therefore, how bright or dark the image is.
| | 00:57 | So, why are there two mechanisms for
controlling the light that strikes the image sensor?
| | 01:01 | The answer to that is somewhat complicated,
| | 01:03 | but the good news is that the answer
involves you, as a photographer, gaining a
| | 01:07 | tremendous amount of creative control,
and that is what the rest of this
| | 01:11 | course will be about.
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3. Camera AnatomyModes| 00:00 | Once a year, my grandmother used to go
down to a local photo studio to have her
| | 00:04 | portrait taken, but she didn't refer
to this is having her picture taken.
| | 00:08 | She always said she was
going to have her picture made.
| | 00:10 | As a kid, I always thought that sounded
little weird, but now I understand that
| | 00:14 | there is an important
difference between those two words.
| | 00:16 | Taking a picture implies that the image
is just sitting out there in the world,
| | 00:20 | yours for the taking if you can
just get a camera trained on it.
| | 00:23 | But the fact is good photos are more often made.
| | 00:26 | That is you can't simply point a camera
at some scenes and walk away with a good
| | 00:30 | shot; instead, you have to make the shot.
| | 00:32 | You have to come up with answers to
a lot of questions, and make quite a
| | 00:35 | few decisions: from composition to where
you're going to stand to your exposure settings.
| | 00:40 | Some images will require more decisions
than others, but photography is largely
| | 00:44 | a process of working your
way through a lot of options.
| | 00:48 | In the old days when cameras were all
manual, you have to make every single one
| | 00:51 | of this decisions yourself.
| | 00:52 | But with the automatic features on
today's cameras, you can choose which
| | 00:55 | decisions you want to make and which
you want to leave up to the camera.
| | 00:58 | Now somewhere on your camera is a mode control.
| | 01:02 | The shooting mode you choose controls
which decisions the camera makes and which
| | 01:06 | will be left up to you.
| | 01:07 | For example, this Canon camera here
simply has a mode dial here on the top.
| | 01:12 | I can turn it to change shooting mode.
| | 01:15 | All cameras these days have a full auto mode.
| | 01:17 | In this mode the camera makes every
single decision and offers you very little
| | 01:21 | control, or override.
| | 01:23 | Most cameras also have a program mode,
which is marked with a P. This affords
| | 01:28 | you a little more control then auto
mode and is usually a nice balance of
| | 01:31 | automation and manual control.
| | 01:33 | If you're using a smaller camera,
like a small point-and-shot camera, you
| | 01:36 | may not have a mode dial, simply because
there may not be room on the camera for a dial.
| | 01:41 | So you'll dig out your mode there from the menu.
| | 01:44 | Throughout the rest of this course,
we'll be discussing the other modes that you
| | 01:47 | might see on your mode control.
| | 01:48 | What you need to do now is to identify
your camera's mode control, learn how to
| | 01:52 | use it, and figure out how to
get your camera into program mode.
| | 01:55 | Your cameras manual should
walk you through how to do this.
| | 01:58 | Remember, program mode is mostly
going to make all relevant decisions for
| | 02:02 | you, but as you'll see, you'll also
have some powerful manual overrides at
| | 02:06 | your disposal.
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| Pressing the shutter button| 00:00 | It's time to discuss how to press
the shutter button on your camera.
| | 00:05 | Now I know that may sound a little
patronizing, particularly when I talk like this.
| | 00:10 | But it turns out that that simple
button press triggers a fairly complex
| | 00:13 | chain of events, and you need to be aware of
those events when you press the shutter button.
| | 00:17 | If you don't understand everything that
happens, you could miss shots, or end up
| | 00:21 | with images with bad exposure or bad color.
| | 00:24 | So, to work through what we're going
to cover here, you first need to switch
| | 00:28 | your camera to program mode.
| | 00:29 | We covered mode changes earlier, so
you should be comfortable with this.
| | 00:33 | In the days of all manual photography,
before you took a shot, you framed it,
| | 00:37 | then you focused, then you dialed in
your exposure settings, and it was only
| | 00:40 | after doing all of those
things that you could take a shot.
| | 00:43 | You still have to do about all of those
things, but the good news is that your
| | 00:46 | camera can probably do them for you,
and it probably does a very good job.
| | 00:51 | The way you start this process is to
press the shutter button down halfway.
| | 00:55 | Now, if you take a moment now to feel
your shutter button, and I mean feel what
| | 00:59 | happens when you press it, you'll find
that it is pressing it all the way down,
| | 01:03 | but then there is also a halfway
point, a little stop that you can feel.
| | 01:08 | When you press to this point, you're
telling the camera to start working on all
| | 01:12 | of those decisions that need
to be made before it can shoot.
| | 01:15 | The first decision is autofocus.
| | 01:17 | When I press halfway, my camera's
autofocus mechanism springs into action
| | 01:21 | and calculates focus.
| | 01:23 | Next, a light meter in my camera
measures the light in the scene and calculates
| | 01:26 | the shutter speed and aperture
| | 01:27 | that'll give me a good
image for that particular light.
| | 01:29 | That is, an image that's
neither too bright nor too dark.
| | 01:32 | Now finally, the camera
also calculates white balance.
| | 01:35 | This is a process that will improve the chances
that the colors in my scene will look correct.
| | 01:40 | Now this is all a fair amount of work,
and it can actually take some time,
| | 01:43 | especially if you're
trying to focus in low light.
| | 01:45 | Well, once it's made all of these
decisions, your camera will beep at you and
| | 01:49 | possibly flash a little
light in the viewfinder.
| | 01:51 | This lets you know that all the necessary
preparation is done, and you're ready to shoot.
| | 01:56 | Now, you press the shutter button the rest
of the way, and the camera takes the shot.
| | 02:01 | Now it's absolutely critical that you
always half-press, hold there, wait until
| | 02:08 | the camera says it's ready,
and then press the rest of the way.
| | 02:11 | If you just mesh the shutter button
down all the way, the odds are you're going
| | 02:15 | to miss your shot, because your camera
has to chug through all of those steps
| | 02:19 | before it can take the picture.
| | 02:20 | It's a much faster than you would be
doing it if you were doing it yourself, but
| | 02:23 | it still takes some time
for your camera to do this.
| | 02:26 | If you've experienced that problem of
trying to capture a particular moment,
| | 02:29 | and you press the button, and the
camera doesn't take the picture when you
| | 02:32 | thought it was going to,
| | 02:32 | that's probably because
you've mashed it all the way down.
| | 02:36 | So if you're not already used to this
process, then you need to start practicing
| | 02:39 | it, because this half-press step is
going to be critical for some of the more
| | 02:43 | sophisticated light
metering that we'll be doing later.
| | 02:46 | Autofocus, metering, white balance,
these are all complex operations, and we're
| | 02:50 | going to talk about all of them
in great detail as we continue.
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| Autofocus| 00:00 | As you may recall from high
school biology class, there are two types of
| | 00:03 | light-sensitive cells in
your eye: rods and cones.
| | 00:07 | Codes are the color-sensitive cells
and most of the cones in your eye are
| | 00:11 | gathered into a very small area at
the back of your eye, called the fovea.
| | 00:16 | The fovea is responsible for the
focused part of your field of view.
| | 00:19 | Now it is not immediately obvious,
but the only part of your field of view--
| | 00:23 | that is, the only part of all
of the stuff that you can see--
| | 00:25 | the only part that is in focus is an
area roughly the size of the tip of your
| | 00:29 | thumb when held at arm's length.
| | 00:31 | That is this little bit right here.
| | 00:32 | Now if you don't believe that, give this a try.
| | 00:35 | Get a piece of paper that has some text
on it, tear a page out of a magazine or
| | 00:38 | just use a book or something.
| | 00:40 | Hold it at arm's length and put
your thumb in the middle of it.
| | 00:43 | Now, focus your eyes on your thumb, and
with your peripheral vision try to read
| | 00:48 | the text that's around your thumb.
| | 00:49 | You should find that you can't,
that it is completely out of focus.
| | 00:52 | Take your thumb away, and what was
underneath your thumb is in focus.
| | 00:57 | Since only a small part of your field
of view is in focus, you subconsciously
| | 01:00 | move your eyes around to sample
different areas of your field of view, and your
| | 01:04 | brain assembles this into a big image
that gives you a sense of an overall
| | 01:07 | impression of focus.
| | 01:08 | But when it comes time to closely
examine something, like reading text on a
| | 01:12 | page, then you actually look at
that thing, and you focus your eyes.
| | 01:15 | In other words, you choose which part of
your field of view that you want to focus on.
| | 01:19 | Now your camera's autofocus
mechanism is very similar in that you must
| | 01:23 | choose where you want it to focus.
| | 01:25 | Choose the wrong place,
and your subject may be soft or blurry.
| | 01:29 | Now earlier we discussed the importance
of half-pressing the shutter, but this
| | 01:33 | is such an important topic
| | 01:34 | I've decided to nag you about it some
more, before we launch into a discussion
| | 01:37 | how to use the focus points
that appear in your viewfinder.
| | 01:40 | So if you look here, you will see that
we built a simple little scene here, some
| | 01:44 | nice old, antique cameras. And my
digital SLR is pointed at that scene.
| | 01:49 | Now what this big thing is here, this
monitor, we have taken a video feed out
| | 01:53 | of my camera, and so what you are seeing here on
the screen is what I would see in my viewfinder.
| | 01:58 | This is going to allow you to see
exactly what I am seeing when I am shooting.
| | 02:02 | So I am going to do what I am
supposed to do and press the shutter
| | 02:05 | button halfway down.
| | 02:06 | When I do, my camera calculates, auto
focus, it meters the light in my scene, it
| | 02:11 | calculates a white balance. When it's
done it, it beeps, and it flashes a light
| | 02:15 | in the viewfinder, and most
importantly, there, it has done it.
| | 02:19 | You can see--oops, wrong finger--
you can see right down here
| | 02:22 | it has calculated a shutter speed of a
third of a second, an aperture of about 4.
| | 02:26 | Now it has also turned on a
bunch of lights in my viewfinder.
| | 02:30 | Your viewfinder may not look exactly like this.
| | 02:32 | What each one of these squares is is a
different point that the camera can choose to
| | 02:36 | auto focus, and you can see these
ones that are lit up in red are where it
| | 02:40 | has chosen to focus.
| | 02:41 | They are all sitting on top of this
antique slide projector, and so I know that
| | 02:46 | the camera is choosing to
focus on my subject. That's great!
| | 02:50 | When you stop to think about it,
you'll realize that auto focus is a very
| | 02:53 | difficult thing to pull off.
| | 02:54 | In any given scene, like this one, there
might be a lot of things that could be
| | 02:57 | the subject of the image.
| | 02:58 | The auto focus system has to try figure
out what thing in the scene is supposed
| | 03:02 | to be the subject, and then it has to
drive the lens to focus on that thing.
| | 03:05 | This is why individual camera vendors
tout their specific autofocus mechanisms:
| | 03:09 | it's a really hard thing to engineer.
| | 03:11 | Now in this scene we got a pretty
simple situation, because our subject, the
| | 03:15 | slide projector, is in the very center
of the frame, so all of the focus lights
| | 03:18 | that lit up were right there in the
center as they were supposed to be.
| | 03:21 | Let's look at what happens if
we go to a more complex scene.
| | 03:25 | Okay, check out our new scene here.
| | 03:27 | We've placed three antique cameras in
the front of a scene, and we have got the
| | 03:31 | old slide project in back.
| | 03:33 | Now the important thing to remember
about autofocus is that when you half-
| | 03:36 | press that shutter button to focus,
your auto focus system does not pick a
| | 03:40 | particular object to focus on.
| | 03:41 | In the last example, it didn't say
oh, there is a slide projector.
| | 03:44 | I'll focus on that.
| | 03:45 | It picks a depth to focus at.
| | 03:47 | So watch what happens when I
half-press my shutter button to focus.
| | 03:54 | It's lit up a focus point on this
camera and this camera and this camera and
| | 03:58 | the front of the table.
| | 04:00 | In other words, it's lit up points on
any thing that's at the distance that it
| | 04:04 | has chosen to focus on.
| | 04:06 | Let's look at this a little closer here.
| | 04:07 | This camera, this camera, this camera,
and the front of the table all sit on
| | 04:12 | this plane right here, and that's the
distance that the camera has chosen to
| | 04:15 | focus at, so all of these
things will be in focus.
| | 04:18 | That thing back there is behind that plane
of focus, so it is not going to be in focus.
| | 04:22 | One of the most important things to
remember about your autofocus system is
| | 04:27 | that it chooses to focus at a particular
distance and lights up the point on the
| | 04:32 | object that is at that distance.
| | 04:33 | Therefore, when you press the button,
you need to be really careful to check
| | 04:38 | that your subject has a
focus point lit up on it.
| | 04:41 | If this was lit up, I would have bad focus.
| | 04:44 | These are lit up on what I want to actually be
in focus in the image, so I am in good shape.
| | 04:49 | Something else to know is that there
will be times when your autofocus system
| | 04:51 | picks the wrong thing.
| | 04:53 | On a lot of cameras, you can work
around that by simply pressing the shutter
| | 04:56 | button again--see how it has
picked some different points here.
| | 04:59 | I can press again, and it
gives me different sets.
| | 05:02 | So that allows me to quickly try, or quickly
get access to some different focus points.
| | 05:08 | These are the basics of autofocus,
but your camera probably has many more auto
| | 05:12 | focus features in there, some other
auto focus techniques that are good to know
| | 05:15 | about, and you can learn about
all of those in the "Foundations of
| | 05:18 | Photography: Lenses" course.
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| Light metering| 00:00 | First and foremost, good exposure is
about capturing an image that has the right
| | 00:05 | level of brightness.
| | 00:06 | As you have seen, you can control
how much light hits the image sensor by
| | 00:10 | changing your camera's
shutter speed and aperture.
| | 00:13 | As more light hits the sensor,
your image gets brighter.
| | 00:17 | But how do you know how much light is enough?
| | 00:19 | After all, there are lots of shutter
speed aperture combinations to choose from,
| | 00:23 | and there are a lot of different
lighting conditions in the world.
| | 00:26 | Fortunately, to ease the whole exposure
problem, your camera has a light meter
| | 00:30 | which can measure the light in your scene.
| | 00:32 | Unless you are in manual mode,
every time you have press the shutter
| | 00:36 | button, the camera measures the amount
of light in the scene and then calculates
| | 00:40 | a shutter speed and aperture
combination that will yield good exposure.
| | 00:44 | Once it's calculated these values, it displays
them in the camera viewfinder as pair of numbers.
| | 00:49 | Shutter speed is usually on the left,
| | 00:51 | aperture is usually on the right.
| | 00:53 | Now, try this with your camera.
| | 00:55 | Put it in program mode and go to a room
that has a window on one side. Point the
| | 01:00 | camera out the window
and half-press the shutter button.
| | 01:03 | Note the shutter speed and aperture values
that are displayed after the camera meters.
| | 01:08 | Now, point the camera in the opposite
direction, towards the wall opposite the
| | 01:12 | window. Half-press the shutter
button again and note the numbers that are
| | 01:16 | displayed this time.
| | 01:17 | They should be different,
and this should make sense to you.
| | 01:21 | When you are pointed out the window in the
daylight, the camera needs one set of
| | 01:24 | exposure values to get a good image.
| | 01:26 | When you point back into the room,
where it's darker, it needs another set.
| | 01:31 | As you saw earlier, this is just how
your eye behaves when light changes.
| | 01:35 | Even if it's night out, this should still
work, as the view outside the window is
| | 01:39 | probably darker then what's in your house.
| | 01:41 | So as you can see, the exposure numbers
that are calculated are a direct result of
| | 01:46 | type of lighting your scene.
| | 01:47 | There is a shutter speed and aperture
value, and together they control how bright
| | 01:52 | or dark your final image is.
| | 01:53 | Now, I have been teasing you with the
ideas that these controls give you more
| | 01:57 | then just overall brightness control,
and now we are finally ready to talk
| | 02:01 | about how.
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| White balance| 00:00 | Because this is a course on exposure,
the majority of our concerns are going to
| | 00:03 | be whether our bright things are bright
enough without being too bright, and our
| | 00:06 | dark things are dark
enough without being too dark.
| | 00:09 | However, exposure does have an
impact on color, as we'll see later.
| | 00:13 | More critically though, the color in
your image is impacted by something
| | 00:16 | called white balance.
| | 00:18 | You heard me mention that term while
we have been talking about what happens
| | 00:21 | when you half-press the shutter button,
| | 00:23 | so we are going to take a quick look at it now.
| | 00:24 | This is just going to be a cursory
discussion because I don't want us to get
| | 00:28 | to sidetracked from exposure. But we'll be
returning to white balance in detail later.
| | 00:32 | The simplest explanation of white
balance is that there are different types
| | 00:35 | of lights and each of these different types
of light has a different color characteristic.
| | 00:40 | To get accurate color in your images
then, your camera has to be calibrated to
| | 00:44 | the type of light you are shooting in.
| | 00:46 | White balancing is the process of
calibrating your camera to the color
| | 00:49 | characteristics of your light source.
| | 00:51 | When white balance is off, you can end up
with color that's pretty wrong, like this.
| | 00:57 | Obviously, this is not a look that
you usually want, and you'd be pretty
| | 01:00 | disappointed if you came home with a
bunch of images with this much blue.
| | 01:03 | While your camera has a lot of different white
balance controls, it also has an auto control.
| | 01:07 | In most cases, auto will give
you correct color, like this.
| | 01:11 | So right now I just want you
leave your white balance set on auto.
| | 01:14 | If you are not sure how to do that, check
your camera's manual, under white balance.
| | 01:18 | Later, we'll look at white balance in more
detail and discuss when you might want
| | 01:22 | to switch off of auto, and why.
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|
|
4. Shutter Speed FundamentalsShooting sharp images| 00:00 | As a photographer, an understanding
of exposure brings you many advantages.
| | 00:05 | First and foremost, it helps you
guarantee that your images will be sharp.
| | 00:09 | Very often in classes, I'll see
students come back with images that are soft,
| | 00:13 | or outright blurry.
| | 00:14 | "My camera is not focusing right,"
will be their immediate conclusion.
| | 00:18 | But more often then that, the problem
is not on a focus, but of shutter speed.
| | 00:22 | You know that with a higher shutter
speed, the shutter stays open longer, so a
| | 00:27 | shutter speed at 1/30th of the second
means the shutter stays opens twice as long
| | 00:31 | as it does when set at 1/60th of second.
| | 00:34 | Now, if there is something in the frame
that's moving while the shutter is open,
| | 00:38 | then there is a good chance that thing
will appear blurry in your final image.
| | 00:42 | If your shutter speed is fast enough,
then a moving object can be frozen, but if
| | 00:45 | the shutter speed is too slow, then you
might see some smearing and blurring.
| | 00:49 | Now what you have to remember is that
if a shutter is open, and the camera
| | 00:53 | moves, you will get the same smearing and
blurring, but it will be of your entire shot.
| | 00:59 | In other words, camera shake can
make your image appear out of focus, and
| | 01:03 | shakiness is more of a problem
when shutter speeds are slow.
| | 01:07 | Now there are times when your camera
may not focus right--or more likely, that
| | 01:11 | you are not using your camera's
autofocus mechanism properly.
| | 01:14 | So if you come home with an image
that's soft, how do you tell if the problem
| | 01:17 | was camera shake or a focusing problem?
| | 01:21 | The woman in this image is out of
focus, and in this case, the cause is
| | 01:24 | the focusing problem. How do I know?
| | 01:26 | Because the background behind her is in focus.
| | 01:29 | This is a case where the autofocus
mechanism decided that the background was
| | 01:32 | the subject, and because I wasn't
paying attention to which focus point it
| | 01:35 | selected, I didn't notice that
she was not chosen the subject.
| | 01:39 | Here she is again, and again she is out
of focus, but this time our problem is
| | 01:44 | camera shake, which you can tell
because the entire frame is soft.
| | 01:48 | So, now we get to your first applied
exposure lesson, which is going to be
| | 01:52 | learning to prevent camera shake
by becoming somewhat obsessive about shutter speed.
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| Noting shutter speed| 00:00 | Violinists practice scales, painters
practice line, people who are lousy at
| | 00:05 | their craft don't practice at all.
| | 00:08 | Now you can probably get where I am
going with this: to be a good photographer
| | 00:11 | you have to practice--
you have to practice a lot.
| | 00:13 | Just as a violinist practices scales
until they are in her fingers, you've got
| | 00:18 | to practice shooting until
certain things are muscle memory.
| | 00:22 | You have learned the importance of
half-pressing your shutter button to
| | 00:25 | autofocus and meter.
| | 00:26 | That's your first kind of muscle-memory habit.
| | 00:28 | Your second one has to be to always take note
of shutter speed after you meter. Here is why.
| | 00:34 | You have seen that a slow shutter
speed can blur things in an image, and you
| | 00:40 | understand that when I am shooting at
a slower shutter speed, there is a chance
| | 00:44 | that camera-shake is going to
render my entire image soft or blurry.
| | 00:47 | That means that every single time you
half-press that shutter button to meter,
| | 00:52 | you have to take note of your shutter
speed to find out if it is fast enough
| | 00:56 | to get a good shot. Now if you are on a tripod,
this isn't going to matter, but when we are shooting
| | 01:00 | handheld, you have to always note
shutter speed to make sure it is fast enough
| | 01:05 | for handheld shooting.
| | 01:06 | Now I am out here in bright daylight right now.
| | 01:07 | It's full-on afternoon daylight.
| | 01:10 | So I am going to meter on these
flowers here, and I see that I get a shutter
| | 01:14 | speed of 1/250th of a second.
| | 01:16 | That is plenty fast for handheld shooting.
| | 01:19 | There are going to be other times
though when you might see that your shutter
| | 01:22 | speed is a little bit too slow.
| | 01:24 | Let's take a look at one of them.
| | 01:27 | Take a situation like this.
| | 01:28 | This should feel somewhat familiar to you.
| | 01:30 | I am in a restaurant. Some friends are here.
| | 01:32 | I just want to take some pictures of them.
| | 01:34 | It's much, much lower light
in here than it was outside.
| | 01:38 | In fact, it's so low that when I meter, my
shutter speed is reading a third of a second.
| | 01:44 | A third of a second is way
too slow for handheld shooting.
| | 01:47 | At a third of a second, any tiny, little shake
is going to appear in my image as blurriness.
| | 01:53 | So this is why it is so critical that
you always, always, always, always take
| | 01:57 | note of the shutter speed after you
meter, because this is a fairly normal
| | 02:01 | situation we are in, the kind of situation
where you are going to want to take pictures.
| | 02:04 | The inside of your house is probably
like this, the inside of your office,
| | 02:07 | inside of a restaurant, any kind of
social situation where you are wanting
| | 02:11 | to shoot, you are going to very
potentially be facing a lower shutter speed problem.
| | 02:15 | Now, how slow is too slow?
| | 02:17 | To be honest, there is a fairly exacting
formula you can use for calculating the
| | 02:22 | minimum shutter speed that's
allowed when shooting handheld.
| | 02:25 | We are not going to go into that right now.
| | 02:26 | You can learn about that in the lenses course.
| | 02:28 | We are just going to, for now, use
a blanket shutter speed, and say, if
| | 02:32 | your shutter speed is reading less
then a 60th of a second, you are in
| | 02:36 | danger of camera shake.
| | 02:39 | You are possibly in the realm of shutter
speed that is too slow. So what do you do?
| | 02:43 | I come into a place like
this. My friends are here.
| | 02:45 | I want to shoot them, and my
camera meters a third of a second.
| | 02:49 | Well, there are a couple of things that we
are going to learn later that you can do.
| | 02:52 | We don't want to get to those yet.
| | 02:53 | First, I want you to develop
this habit, in the meantime.
| | 02:55 | When you face this kind of situation,
when your shutter speed drops below a 60th
| | 02:58 | of a second, you need to decide to either,
well, this is too slow, I am just not
| | 03:03 | going to take this picture, or you
have got to work really, really hard to
| | 03:06 | stabilize your camera.
| | 03:08 | In this case, because I am
standing up, stabilization is pretty easy.
| | 03:12 | I put my elbows at my side. I keep them there.
| | 03:14 | I put my camera in this hand.
| | 03:17 | It is being buttressed by this
elbow. My other hand goes here.
| | 03:20 | I raise the camera all the way to my eye.
| | 03:22 | I don't hold the camera out
here and put my head up to it.
| | 03:25 | I come all the way up here.
| | 03:25 | This is a very, very, very stable way to shoot.
| | 03:29 | I can also try to set the camera on something.
| | 03:32 | Stabilize it this way.
| | 03:33 | If I am sitting down, I can
rest my elbows on the table.
| | 03:36 | It might technically be bad etiquette,
but for photography it is a great thing--
| | 03:39 | anything you can to get the camera stable.
| | 03:42 | Now a little bit later you can learn some
exposure tricks to get you out of these
| | 03:45 | low-shutter-speed situations, but
I don't want you to go there yet.
| | 03:49 | Right now your goal is to develop a
muscle-memory-ingrained habit that every
| | 03:56 | single time you meter, you read that
shutter speed and find out if it's fast
| | 04:01 | enough for you to get the shot you want.
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| Taking control of shutter speed| 00:00 | We've covered a lot of material so
far, a lot of basic theory, and some
| | 00:04 | important habits that you'll need for
the rest of your photographic career.
| | 00:07 | We're now about to move on to more
artistic uses of exposure control.
| | 00:11 | So let's take a moment to recap.
| | 00:13 | You've seen that the shutter is a pair of
curtains that sit in front of your image sensor.
| | 00:17 | When you press the shutter button to
take a picture, the first curtain opens to
| | 00:21 | expose the sensor, and then the
second one follows to stop the exposure.
| | 00:25 | You've seen that shutter speed is
measured in seconds, usually fractions of a
| | 00:28 | second--though it is possible to have
exposure times of minutes or hours or even
| | 00:32 | days, if you're shooting in extremely low light.
| | 00:35 | And you've seen that with slower
shutter speeds, it's possible for a shaky
| | 00:39 | camera to blur your image.
| | 00:41 | Therefore, shutter speed is crucial for
shooting sharp images that are free of handheld shake.
| | 00:46 | This understanding of shutter speed and
the effects of camera shake should help
| | 00:50 | you come home with far fewer blurry images.
| | 00:53 | But now it's time to consider how you
can exploit the fact that a slow shutter
| | 00:57 | speed can lead the things
in your frame being blurry.
| | 01:00 | By intentionally choosing a fast or a
slow shutter speed, you can opt to render
| | 01:05 | moving objects in your scene
| | 01:07 | razor sharp or smear them blurry.
| | 01:10 | This allows you to create a dynamic
sense of movement, or to freeze an action-
| | 01:14 | packed moment of time for razor-sharp observation.
| | 01:17 | This is the beginning of the
creative possibility of exposure.
| | 01:21 | To exploit this motion-controlling
power, you need to know how to select a
| | 01:24 | specific shutter speed, and your
camera probably offers you many controls
| | 01:29 | for doing this.
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| Stop defined| 00:00 | Even if you've only dabbled in
photography, you've probably heard the term
| | 00:04 | f-stop, or simply stop.
| | 00:06 | Stop is a term that comes up regularly
in photography, especially when you
| | 00:10 | start working with your aperture
control, the settings of which are regularly
| | 00:13 | referred to as f-stops.
| | 00:15 | But to a photographer, a stop is
more than just a setting on your camera.
| | 00:18 | It's a measure of light.
| | 00:20 | Take a look at this. We've rebuilt the
antique projector scene that we had earlier.
| | 00:25 | What I've got here is the projector on
a stool, and right now it's being lit
| | 00:29 | just by this light right here, this one.
| | 00:32 | I'm going to turn on this light, which is
going to double the amount of light in the scene.
| | 00:37 | When that happens, we say that light
in the scene has increased by one stop.
| | 00:42 | Anytime you double or half the amount
of light in a scene, you increase or
| | 00:47 | decrease the light by one stop.
| | 00:50 | It's really all there is. It's that simple.
| | 00:51 | As you get more experienced, you might
learn to recognize light changes in terms
| | 00:56 | of stops, but that's not necessary to
be able to properly expose your scene,
| | 01:00 | thanks to your camera's light meter.
| | 01:02 | We also use the term "stop" to refer to how
much light is striking the image sensor.
| | 01:06 | Now as you've learned, the amount of
light that's strikes the image sensor is
| | 01:09 | controlled by your
shutter speed and aperture size.
| | 01:12 | You've already seen this list of shutter speeds,
| | 01:14 | but now I want you to take note of something;
| | 01:16 | 250th, 500th, 1, 000th,
each of these is a doubling.
| | 01:21 | A stop represents a doubling or halving
of light, so each one of these shutter
| | 01:25 | speeds is a one-stop difference.
| | 01:27 | It should be pretty intuitive.
| | 01:29 | At 1/250th of a second, the shutter is
open half as long as it was at 1/125th of
| | 01:34 | a second, and so only half as
much light reaches the sensor.
| | 01:37 | Let's take a look at a real-world example.
| | 01:40 | I'm going to take a shot of
this scene. Here is our shot.
| | 01:46 | As you can see, the camera
metered at 1/250th of a second.
| | 01:50 | Now I have both lights turned on,
| | 01:51 | so I'm going to come over here, and turn
off this second light, just like I did before.
| | 01:55 | That's going to cut the amount
of light in the scene by half.
| | 01:59 | Now, I'm going to go back and take another shot.
| | 02:04 | Now look what happened.
| | 02:06 | The camera metered at 1/125th of a
second, which should make sense to you.
| | 02:10 | I cut the amount of light in the scene
in half, and so to correct for that, my
| | 02:14 | camera had to double the shutter speed.
| | 02:17 | Now, these two pictures don't
actually look any different, and that's good.
| | 02:21 | They shouldn't look any different.
| | 02:22 | That means my camera is
doing what it's supposed to do.
| | 02:24 | Remember, it's always trying to meter
to get a good amount of light, an amount
| | 02:27 | that's neither too brighten nor too dark.
| | 02:30 | So when I cut the light, it
compensated it by decreasing my shutter speed to
| | 02:34 | allow for a longer exposure.
| | 02:36 | We're going to be talking about
stops throughout the rest of this course.
| | 02:39 | You're going to encounter them when we talk
about aperture, metering, and many other topics.
| | 02:43 | As long as you always remember that a
stop always represents a doubling or
| | 02:47 | halving of light, you'll be fine.
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| Shutter priority mode| 00:00 | As you've seen, there are lots of reasons
that you might want to control shutter speed.
| | 00:04 | Whether it's to ensure that your
shots are free from camera shake or to
| | 00:08 | intentionally blur or freeze your subject,
| | 00:11 | shutter speed choice is an
essential creative decision.
| | 00:14 | Now, knowing you want a particular
shutter speed doesn't do you any good if you
| | 00:18 | don't know how to select it on your camera.
| | 00:20 | By the end of this course, you'll have seen
several ways to alter shutter speed settings.
| | 00:24 | In this lesson, we're going to
look at shutter priority mode.
| | 00:28 | Now, I've got this little toy here.
| | 00:30 | When I crank it up, these little
spaceships are going to spin around.
| | 00:33 | Now I'm going to take a picture of it
using program mode, which is what you've
| | 00:37 | been doing all along.
| | 00:39 | So I'm here in program mode,
just as I'm supposed to.
| | 00:41 | As I've said before, I'm going to
half-press the shutter to focus and meter.
| | 00:45 | I'm going to take my shot.
| | 00:46 | So here is what program mode
came up with, and it's not bad.
| | 00:49 | Program mode did a good job of
coming up with an adequate exposure.
| | 00:53 | I say adequate because all your meter
does is try to find exposure settings
| | 00:57 | that will yield an image that is
neither too bright nor too dark.
| | 01:00 | But in this case, the vision in my head
was of a scene where the little spinning
| | 01:03 | spaceships were blurred out.
| | 01:05 | They are little blurry,
but they're not super blurry.
| | 01:08 | But they're not real sharp either.
| | 01:09 | So in this case, program mode
came up with an adequate exposure.
| | 01:13 | It just isn't the best for what our
intended result is, because our intended
| | 01:16 | result is some really
smeary spaceships flying around.
| | 01:19 | So, in this instance, I'm going
to switch to shutter priority mode.
| | 01:24 | Now, you should be familiar with how
to change modes on your camera by now.
| | 01:28 | If you're not, check out the modes lesson.
| | 01:30 | If I change to shutter priority mode, I can
now specify the shutter speed that I want.
| | 01:35 | When I meter, by half-pressing the
shutter button, the camera will automatically
| | 01:39 | pick a corresponding aperture value
that will yield a well-exposed image.
| | 01:43 | So, I can specify how fast or slow a
shutter speed I want, and still get an
| | 01:47 | image that's neither too bright nor
too dark because my camera will pick an
| | 01:51 | aperture that will combine with the
shutter speed choice that I've made, and
| | 01:55 | yield a good exposure.
| | 01:56 | So let's do this again.
| | 01:58 | I'm going to--I'm in shutter priority,
so I've got control of shutter speed.
| | 02:01 | Right now, you can see this 60 right here.
| | 02:03 | That means, right now the camera is going to
shoot at a shutter speed of a 60th of a second.
| | 02:07 | That's too fast to really blur out the motion,
so I'm going to slow it down to 30th.
| | 02:10 | I'm going to crank up the spinning
spaceship toy again, and take my shot.
| | 02:19 | So, here is our shot.
| | 02:21 | You can see it's much blurrier than
what we're getting with program mode,
| | 02:23 | because I was able to leave the shutter open
much longer by shooting it at 30th of a second.
| | 02:28 | Let's now do the opposite thing.
| | 02:29 | Let's try to really freeze the motion.
| | 02:31 | So to do that, I'm going to dial the
shutter speed up, so that it's very quick.
| | 02:34 | I'm going to go up to a 1,000th of a
second. I've dialed that into my camera.
| | 02:39 | When I meter, the camera is going to
pick a corresponding aperture that will
| | 02:43 | yield a good exposure, meaning
not too bright or not too dark.
| | 02:47 | My spaceships get going. I take my shot.
| | 02:52 | So, here is what we got.
| | 02:53 | In this case, the spaceships are much
more frozen in space than they were either
| | 02:57 | in program mode or in my first 30th of
a second shot, which makes sense.
| | 03:02 | At a 1,000th of a second, I am catching a
very thin sliver of time, and freezing the
| | 03:06 | motion of these objects.
| | 03:07 | This is the power of shutter speed control.
| | 03:10 | I can choose to blur moving objects.
| | 03:12 | I can choose to freeze moving objects.
| | 03:14 | But just because I want to shoot at a
particular shutter speed doesn't mean
| | 03:18 | that my camera can necessarily choose
an aperture that's going to yield a good
| | 03:22 | exposure with that speed.
| | 03:23 | For example, let's say I want to go
back and shoot another shot of this,
| | 03:26 | but I want to be sure that when it's
moving it's just really frozen, so
| | 03:30 | that it's tacked sharp.
| | 03:31 | So I'm going to increase my shutter speed.
| | 03:32 | Let's say I bump it up to a 4,000th of a second,
very, very fast to really stop the motion.
| | 03:38 | I half-press my shutter button.
| | 03:40 | When I do, I get an aperture, but it's flashing.
| | 03:44 | So what the camera is telling me here
is that it's opened the aperture as wide
| | 03:47 | as it can go, which is at f/1.2,
and it's still not enough.
| | 03:51 | So it's desperately flashing at me, trying
to tell me, "Please, don't take this shot.
| | 03:55 | It's going to be underexposed."
| | 03:57 | I could take the shot anyway.
| | 03:59 | That's the beauty of it is it's not
going to stop me from taking the shot.
| | 04:01 | It's just that when I do take
it, it's going to be too dark.
| | 04:04 | I might be able to brighten
it up in my image editor later.
| | 04:07 | When it's flashing, you don't know,
whether you're over- or underexposed.
| | 04:11 | You just know that you're one or the other.
| | 04:12 | In this case, I might choose to back off
and go down to maybe a 2,000th of a second.
| | 04:17 | When I meter there, I've got a good
aperture, so now I can take the shot.
| | 04:20 | So, with shutter priority mode, you
can take control of the shutter speed of
| | 04:24 | your camera, which gives you
the power to stop and blur motion.
| | 04:28 | Getting good results in trickier
situations though, will require a few extra
| | 04:32 | techniques, which you'll see later.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exercise: Shutter speed| 00:00 | So, shutter speed is a
pretty intuitive thing to get.
| | 00:03 | It's a little bit easier to understand than
aperture, because it's just kind of make sense.
| | 00:07 | You take a faster shutter speeds.
| | 00:09 | You're getting a narrower slice of time.
| | 00:10 | You're freezing more motion.
| | 00:12 | Nevertheless, you need to practice with it.
| | 00:15 | You've learned the concept of shutter speed.
| | 00:17 | You've learned how to
control it with shutter priority.
| | 00:19 | Now it's time to go out and give it
a try, because it can take a while to
| | 00:21 | learn to get your camera set
properly, simply going to pay attention to
| | 00:24 | shutter speed, and particularly
| | 00:26 | if you want to start doing some
trickier thing--like trying to blur motion,
| | 00:29 | trying to pan to blur backgrounds--
you need to practice that stuff.
| | 00:32 | So, get your camera into
shutter priority. Get out.
| | 00:35 | Do a little practice.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to stay here and pet Sage for a while.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Reciprocity| 00:00 | In program mode, when you half-press
the shutter button on your camera, your
| | 00:04 | camera meters the scene and calculates a
shutter speed and aperture that will be
| | 00:07 | adequately exposed,
neither too bright nor too dark.
| | 00:10 | In shutter priority mode, as you've
seen, you can dial in a shutter speed,
| | 00:14 | and the camera will choose a
corresponding aperture that is neither too
| | 00:18 | bright nor too dark.
| | 00:19 | In other words, in both of these modes, your
meter protects you from over- or underexposing.
| | 00:25 | Well, let's look closer at what happens
when I change shutter speed, when I'm in
| | 00:28 | shutter priority mode.
| | 00:30 | I'm back here with a scene we saw before,
| | 00:32 | the toy with the spinning spaceships.
| | 00:34 | Let's say I want to shoot it to freeze
motion, so I dial in a shutter speed of
| | 00:38 | say 1/500th of a second.
| | 00:40 | So here I am in shutter priority mode.
| | 00:42 | I'm dialing up to 1/500th of a second.
| | 00:45 | When I half-press the meter, I see that
the camera has chosen an aperture of f/2.0.
| | 00:51 | Now let's say I decide I want to blur
the motion instead, and so I want a
| | 00:54 | slower shutter speed.
| | 00:55 | So I'm going to slow my
shutter speed by one stop.
| | 00:58 | Remember, a stop is a doubling.
| | 01:00 | So if I switch from 1/500th to 1/250th,
which is a shift from faster to slower,
| | 01:05 | I've changed my shutter speed by one stop.
| | 01:08 | 1/500th halved is 1/250th.
| | 01:12 | So I'm going to slow my shutter speed
down to 1/250th, and now I've gone to f/2.8.
| | 01:17 | I half-press the shutter button again,
| | 01:19 | I see that f/2.8 is what the camera chooses.
| | 01:21 | My light has not changed, but the
camera has chosen a new aperture.
| | 01:25 | When I slowed my shutter speed by
one stop, I allowed twice as much light
| | 01:30 | to reach the sensor.
| | 01:31 | So the camera picked an aperture that is
one stop smaller than what I used before.
| | 01:36 | My shutter speed allowed twice as much light,
| | 01:38 | so to compensate, the camera has picked
an aperture that blocks twice as much as
| | 01:42 | my previous aperture.
| | 01:44 | If we go back to our Aperture chart, we
see that an aperture change from f/2.8
| | 01:49 | to f/2.0 is a change of one stop.
| | 01:52 | Remember, every time I meter, the
camera calculates an exposure that will yield
| | 01:57 | a good level of brightness.
| | 01:58 | Since my light has not changed between
these two shots, the camera is aiming for
| | 02:02 | the same level of exposure.
| | 02:04 | So when I changed shutter speed, the
camera had to choose a different aperture
| | 02:07 | from before, so as to preserve
the same level of brightness.
| | 02:11 | It can do this because
shutter speed and aperture have a
| | 02:13 | reciprocal relationship.
| | 02:15 | If I change one parameter in one
direction, I can change the other parameter
| | 02:18 | by the same amount on the other direction,
and preserve the same overall level of illumination.
| | 02:23 | Now this is not something
unique to shutter priority mode.
| | 02:25 | It's simply a fact of exposure.
| | 02:27 | For any given level of illumination,
there are many combinations of shutter
| | 02:31 | speed and aperture that yield
the same overall brightness.
| | 02:35 | This is great news for you, because it
means that one of those combinations will
| | 02:38 | probably help you achieve the
image that you see in your head.
| | 02:41 | However, this also means that
you cannot over- or underexpose in
| | 02:46 | shutter priority mode.
| | 02:47 | If you change the shutter speed, the
camera will always pick a corresponding
| | 02:50 | aperture that yields a good exposure.
| | 02:51 | If it can't, it will flash
it at you, as you saw earlier.
| | 02:55 | Now this doesn't mean that your
camera will always take perfect exposures.
| | 02:59 | Your light meter can still be confused.
| | 03:01 | Sometimes, it will come up with an
exposure that over- or underexposes things.
| | 03:05 | But if you want to intentionally
over- or underexpose beyond what your meter
| | 03:09 | suggests, you'll need to learn some
additional controls that we'll cover later.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling motion | 00:01 | Shutter speed is a pretty
intuitive thing to understand.
| | 00:03 | With a longer shutter speed, I
capture a longer stretch of time.
| | 00:07 | If something during that stretch of
time is moving around it looks blurry. If I
| | 00:11 | capture a very small sliver
of time, I freeze motion.
| | 00:15 | You have seen how with shutter priority
mode, you can dial in whatever shutter
| | 00:18 | speed you want to take control of motion,
and intentionally blur it or render it sharp.
| | 00:23 | We are going to look at a couple of
real-world examples in this video, and we
| | 00:26 | are going to start with this fountain here.
| | 00:28 | Water is moving all the time, so if I
use a slow shutter speed, I am going to
| | 00:33 | get what appears to be
just a solid sheet of water.
| | 00:36 | If I use a really fast shutter speed, I
am going to freeze droplets in mid-air.
| | 00:40 | So, let's take a look at a couple of shots here.
| | 00:43 | You have to have a tripod to make this
work, because we are going to be using
| | 00:47 | a very long shutter speed--something so
long that there is no way I can handle that.
| | 00:51 | So, I have got my tripod set up.
| | 00:52 | You can see that to get the angle that I wanted,
| | 00:54 | I had to put my tripod in this kind of
weird, legs-akimbo-position-here thing.
| | 00:59 | So, when you are shopping for a
tripod, you want to get one with as much
| | 01:01 | flexibility and motion as you can.
| | 01:03 | That's a real nice feature of this
tripod is that the legs can go out like this.
| | 01:06 | So, I am going to start with just a
kind of midrange shutter speed to show you
| | 01:10 | what I have got here. Now, I put my camera in shutter
priority mode, and I have dialed in 60th of a
| | 01:16 | second, which is what we have been
telling you should be the kind of slowest
| | 01:19 | shutter speed that you should
use in low-light situations.
| | 01:23 | So, that's just a good
general purpose shutter speed.
| | 01:24 | I am going to put it there.
| | 01:25 | Now, at the bottom of the screen here, you see
this gauge that says -3, -2, -1, +1, +2, +3.
| | 01:30 | You are going to learn all
about this in just a little bit.
| | 01:35 | This is the exposure compensation dial.
| | 01:37 | It also serves other functions
when you are shooting in manual mode.
| | 01:40 | You might see that it's at -1
right now. Don't worry about that.
| | 01:43 | That's something I had to do because of
the brightness of the top of the fountain.
| | 01:46 | You are going to learn all about that later.
| | 01:47 | All we are worried about right now is
shutter speed. So I am here at 30th of a second.
| | 01:52 | I have already focused my camera
just to save time during this lesson.
| | 01:55 | I am going to meter, and you see that
my camera says it wants to shoot at 16.
| | 02:00 | We are fine with that.
| | 02:01 | I am going to take my shot,
and here is what I get.
| | 02:05 | It's an okay shot of a fountain.
| | 02:07 | The water is just kind of there.
| | 02:08 | It's not raiser sharp.
It's not super blurry.
| | 02:11 | Let's sharpen it up.
| | 02:12 | I am going to crank my shutter speed
up to something really speedy here.
| | 02:16 | I am going to go as far as I can,
| | 02:19 | which is to a shutter
speed of a 1000th of a second.
| | 02:21 | Now, my camera will
actually go faster than that.
| | 02:24 | I can get my camera actually
up to an 8000th of a second.
| | 02:28 | When I do that you see that the 4.0
starts flashing. That's because this
| | 02:31 | particular lens, the aperture cannot
open any wider than f/4. So if I do this,
| | 02:37 | my image is going to be underexposed.
| | 02:38 | So I am going to go back to 1/1000th
of a second. It looks like actually maybe I
| | 02:43 | can even get up to 1,250.
| | 02:44 | Now, I am going to take that shot, and now
our water has frozen up pretty well there.
| | 02:50 | Let's go ahead and bump it up a
little faster and risk a little bit of
| | 02:53 | underexposure, meaning my image is
going to be a little dark at 1/2000.
| | 02:58 | I can brighten this up in my image
editor later, but it will also just give you
| | 03:02 | a view of just how much I can
freeze the motion of the fountain.
| | 03:05 | Now, let's go the other direction.
| | 03:07 | I am going to go to a slow shutter speed.
| | 03:09 | Now, what's slow enough to stop a
particular motion is something that you
| | 03:12 | will usually have to experiment with,
because our eyes see things at a
| | 03:16 | particular speed all the
time. So I am not sure.
| | 03:18 | I am going to put this at
30th of a second and take a shot.
| | 03:20 | That's kind of soft, but it's
not really what I am going for.
| | 03:24 | I want that water coming off the
bottom of the fountain to just look like a
| | 03:27 | solid sheet of water.
| | 03:28 | So I am going to go much slower
and drop down to an 8th of a second.
| | 03:31 | The f/22 is flashing, so I am
going to go back up until I can get--
| | 03:37 | there we go--a 25th of a second.
| | 03:39 | Let's shoot that. That looks better.
| | 03:42 | Let's go all the way down.
| | 03:43 | I am going to shoot this at 15th of a second.
| | 03:44 | So, that's where we want to be.
| | 03:47 | Now we are getting a nice solid sheet of water.
| | 03:49 | This is the effect you can use
on mountain streams, waterfalls.
| | 03:52 | Anytime you've got moving water, try
shooting both with a fast shutter speed and
| | 03:56 | a slow shutter speed.
| | 03:58 | If you really want to freeze motion--
you have seen that we have a problem of
| | 04:01 | running into the speed of our lens--
| | 04:03 | there is a type of filter you can get
called a neutral density filter that you
| | 04:06 | can put over the end of your lens that
will cut some light without changing the
| | 04:10 | quality of the light.
| | 04:11 | It won't color it or anything, and that can
buy you a little extra shutter speed latitude.
| | 04:14 | Let's look at some other slow
and fast shutter speed examples.
| | 04:17 | So, here we an image that we shot
with a pretty quick shutter speed.
| | 04:22 | We have frozen this motion.
| | 04:23 | This is a trumpet player playing pretty quickly.
| | 04:25 | The image is a little bit soft,
and that's partly because I couldn't get the
| | 04:29 | shutter speed up super high, so I was
still getting a tiny bit of blur, but also
| | 04:33 | this particular camera in low light,
you just get a lot of softening from the
| | 04:37 | noise that's in there.
| | 04:39 | But another option that I shot at
the same time, because I wanted to
| | 04:42 | really cover my subject well and
shoot a lot of different ideas and try a
| | 04:45 | lot of different things,
| | 04:46 | I went intentionally to a much slower
shutter speed and actually tried to get
| | 04:50 | some motion blur.
| | 04:52 | Obviously, this is a fairly abstract image;
| | 04:54 | it conveys a very different
sense than a razor sharp image.
| | 04:58 | Here is another intentional motion blur.
| | 05:01 | This guy was hammering on this pointy
piece of metal, and I wanted to really get
| | 05:04 | the hammering, so I went to a
slower shutter speed intentionally.
| | 05:08 | Now when I do that, I have to be aware
that that slower shutter speed is going
| | 05:12 | to mean that I am really at a risk of
camera shake, so I worked extra hard to be
| | 05:16 | sure that I was holding the camera as
still as possible, so that the only thing
| | 05:20 | that would be blurry in the image
would be actually the fall on the hammer.
| | 05:24 | And what turned out really nice in this
image is that he was holding the rest of
| | 05:28 | his body very still, so it was really nice.
| | 05:30 | There was only the arm that was
moving, so I only got softening and
| | 05:33 | blurring where I wanted it.
| | 05:34 | Here is another example. You can
choose to shoot a sporting activity, or
| | 05:39 | something like the skate boarder, with
a really slow shutter speed to catch a
| | 05:43 | lot of motion. Or you can choose to
shoot it with a very fast shutter speed and
| | 05:49 | try and freeze motion.
| | 05:50 | And again, all of the shots are being
controlled with shutter priority mode,
| | 05:54 | just like we did at the fountain:
| | 05:56 | dialing in the shutter speed that we
want and letting the camera choose the
| | 06:00 | corresponding aperture that
will give us a well exposed image.
| | 06:04 | This thing, you may not recognize right
away as a train, but that's what it is.
| | 06:09 | That's a speeding locomotive.
| | 06:11 | And this is a case where I didn't
really have a choice but to shoot with a
| | 06:14 | slower shutter speed, because
this was the middle of the night.
| | 06:16 | It was really dark;
| | 06:17 | I was not going to get away with a
fast shutter speed without having an image
| | 06:21 | that was incredibly underexposed.
| | 06:23 | I should have brought a tripod.
| | 06:24 | It would be nice if the rest of the image
was a little bit sharper, but still it works.
| | 06:28 | I had to go to a very slow shutter speed
and just try and hold still, and what was
| | 06:32 | nice was the train was going fast
enough so I got a really nice blur.
| | 06:35 | So, sometimes if you are in low light,
you have no choice but to work with a
| | 06:40 | slow shutter speed. You have
no choice but to blur motion.
| | 06:43 | At that point, don't fight it.
Just give in to it and see what you can come up
| | 06:46 | with, by choosing to let
moving objects smear around.
| | 06:50 | Again, shutter speed is a big
apart of your creative toolbox.
| | 06:53 | It's a very important apart of your
photographic vocabulary, so don't be afraid
| | 06:57 | to try to experiment with blurring
motion, experiment with freezing motion,
| | 07:01 | trying both if you have the option.
| | 07:03 | You may not be sure what's going to
be best until you get home and take a
| | 07:06 | look at your images.
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| Shutter speed increments| 00:01 | Take a look at this list of shutter speeds.
| | 00:03 | You have seen this before in this course.
| | 00:05 | Now, you may have spotted this already,
but each one of these shutter speeds is
| | 00:09 | roughly double the previous.
| | 00:11 | If you watch the Reciprocity lesson, you
should know the significance of that doubling.
| | 00:15 | As you saw before, every time you
double the amount of light that strikes the
| | 00:19 | sensor, you increase the exposure by 1
stop; conversely, if you halve the light,
| | 00:25 | you decrease the exposure by 1 stop.
| | 00:28 | So these shutter speeds are all 1 stop apart.
| | 00:32 | These are the standard shutter speeds
that you will find in all cameras, and
| | 00:35 | in the old days of manual cameras, these were
the only shutter speeds you had at your disposal.
| | 00:39 | Now, while that may have been a
little limiting in terms of finessing your
| | 00:42 | exposure settings, it made the math of
exposure very easy to do in your head.
| | 00:47 | Your digital camera probably has
additional shutter speeds between
| | 00:50 | these, because your digital camera
can probably change shutter speed in
| | 00:54 | 1/3-stop increments.
| | 00:56 | So, as you dial through the shutter
speeds on your camera, you will probably see
| | 01:00 | a selection that looks more like this.
| | 01:03 | I have put the full stop
shutter speeds in boldface.
| | 01:07 | Those are two numbers you see between
each boldface pair or 1/3rd-stop intervals.
| | 01:12 | Let's take a look at it on a real camera here.
| | 01:14 | This camera can change exposure
intervals in 1/2-stop or 1/3rd-stop increments.
| | 01:20 | That's a setting I can change in
the custom functions on this camera.
| | 01:23 | Your camera may or may not have that option.
| | 01:25 | So, I am in shutter priority mode,
and I am currently set at 1/30 of a second.
| | 01:29 | I am going to increase my shutter speed, so
I am going to increase it to a faster speed.
| | 01:34 | I dial it up one notch,
and I get to a 40th of a second.
| | 01:38 | You can see that right down here.
| | 01:39 | That's 1/3rd-stop faster than a 30th of a second.
| | 01:43 | From there, I go to 50th
of a second. That's 2/3rds.
| | 01:46 | With my next setting, I am going to get
to my next full-stop increment, that is
| | 01:50 | the first doubling of my
original shutter speed, which is a 60th.
| | 01:54 | From there, up a third-of-a-stop would
be 80th, then 1/100th, and then finally to
| | 01:59 | my second full-stop doubling at 1/25th.
| | 02:01 | So, how do you know how much to adjust
shutter speed to achieve a desired effect?
| | 02:06 | Sometimes that's just experimentation.
| | 02:08 | If you want to blur an image, start
with a slower shutter speed, take a shot,
| | 02:11 | see how it looks. That immediate
review is one of the great advantages of
| | 02:14 | digital photography.
| | 02:15 | And over time you will learn from
experience what shutter speed is a good
| | 02:18 | starting point for a specific effect.
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| Exercise: Go work with shutter speed | 00:00 | Now, it's time to take all of this
shutter speed stuff that you have seen and go
| | 00:03 | out in the world and give it a try.
| | 00:05 | So, you are going to want to put your
camera in shutter priority mode and go
| | 00:08 | find some moving objects.
| | 00:10 | You want to freeze them.
| | 00:11 | You want to blur them.
| | 00:13 | Remember, longer shutter speeds mean
blurrier objects; faster shutter speeds
| | 00:17 | means frozen motion.
| | 00:18 | When you are working with longer
shutter speeds, you are probably going to need
| | 00:20 | a tripod, or you are going to have to
work really hard to steady your camera.
| | 00:24 | One of the trickiest things might be
just finding some moving subject matter.
| | 00:28 | Working with water is a good thing.
| | 00:30 | Obviously, if you live near like
Indianapolis 500 kind of racetrack sort of
| | 00:34 | thing, that's a great spot to go.
| | 00:35 | Otherwise maybe try city parks
where dogs might be running, people are
| | 00:39 | bicycling, roller skaters, bowling
alleys, anywhere you can think of that
| | 00:43 | you might get movement.
| | 00:44 | However, you don't just want to use this
bit of your photographic vocabulary for big,
| | 00:47 | dramatic movement; also look for small things:
| | 00:49 | People walking down the street.
Sometimes it's interesting just to take a
| | 00:52 | simple moment, a simple kind of
everyday moment and experiment with the blur of
| | 00:56 | the turn of someone's head, things like that.
| | 00:58 | So this is not just a sports or very
active sort of part of your vocabulary,
| | 01:03 | it's something you can use for
even more mundane situations.
| | 01:07 | So get out and give it a try.
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|
|
5. Aperture in DepthDepth of field| 00:00 | So, you can use both shutter speed and
aperture to change the amount of light
| | 00:05 | that strikes the sensor.
| | 00:06 | But why would you choose one over the other?
| | 00:09 | As you have seen, in addition to
controlling light, when you change shutter
| | 00:12 | speed, you also change how much moving
objects in a scene are frozen or blurred.
| | 00:18 | When you change aperture, in addition to
controlling brightness, you also get a
| | 00:22 | change in depth of field.
| | 00:25 | Depth of field is a measure of
how much of your scene is in focus.
| | 00:28 | Now, you might think, don't I want all of
my scene to be in focus? Not necessarily.
| | 00:34 | By shortening depth of field, you can
blur out the background behind your image.
| | 00:38 | Or by deepening your depth of field,
| | 00:41 | you can ensure that
everything in your image is in focus.
| | 00:43 | That's something even your eye can't do.
| | 00:46 | One of your most important goals as a
photographer is to ensure that the viewer
| | 00:49 | knows how to read your image. And at
the simplest level, that means you want to
| | 00:53 | be certain that they know what
the subject of your image is.
| | 00:57 | This is the goal of composition:
| | 00:58 | you arrange the elements of your scene, so
that there is a definite subject and background.
| | 01:03 | Depth of field is another tool that
you have to guide the viewer's eye.
| | 01:07 | By softening the background,
your subject becomes more prominent.
| | 01:11 | In a landscape shot, the landscape itself
is often the subject, so you want to be
| | 01:15 | sure that all of it is in focus.
| | 01:17 | Aperture is the key to
controlling depth of field.
| | 01:21 | So now, at last, you should be getting
an idea of why there are two mechanisms
| | 01:25 | for controlling light.
| | 01:27 | While both aperture and shutter speed
can alter the amount of light that strikes
| | 01:31 | your image sensor, they do this in
very different ways, which have very
| | 01:34 | different impacts on your final image.
| | 01:37 | Changing shutter speed alters the
sense of motion in an image, while changing
| | 01:40 | aperture alters the depth of field.
| | 01:43 | Together these two parameters give you
a tremendous amount of creative power.
| | 01:48 | But to make use of aperture, you need
to know how to manually control it on
| | 01:52 | your camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| How aperture is measured| 00:00 | Shutter speed is a fairly easy thing to
understand, because we are all familiar
| | 00:04 | with fractions of time.
| | 00:06 | Minutes are fractions of an hour,
| | 00:07 | seconds are fractions of minutes, the
line at the DMV is a fraction of your
| | 00:11 | life you will never get back, and so on.
| | 00:13 | Aperture is a little more complicated.
| | 00:16 | You have seen how the iris in your
lens closes down to block out more light.
| | 00:20 | What makes aperture a little less easy
to understand than shutter speed is that
| | 00:23 | when it comes times to specify the
size of the aperture's opening, we are
| | 00:27 | talking about measuring the area of the
circle, and that's something most of us
| | 00:30 | don't have much experience with.
| | 00:32 | Over time, you will simply
memorize what we are about to see here.
| | 00:36 | Aperture sizes are denoted with an f-
s top number, and the bigger the number, the
| | 00:41 | smaller the aperture.
| | 00:42 | What we are seeing here is a list of
standard aperture sizes, ranging from a
| | 00:46 | fairly wide f/2.8 to a fairly small f/16.
| | 00:50 | What you can't tell from looking at the
numbers, or at the size of the openings
| | 00:53 | for that matter, is that these
apertures are each one stop apart--that is, each
| | 00:59 | smaller aperture lets in half as
much light as the previous aperture.
| | 01:03 | Now, here is the depth of field bit:
| | 01:05 | wider apertures yield shallower depth of field.
| | 01:08 | So in this chart, the wide open f/2.8
aperture, will have very shallow depth of
| | 01:13 | field, while the narrow f/16
aperture will have very deep depth of field.
| | 01:17 | So, say I am shooting a portrait,
and I want to blur out the background.
| | 01:21 | I will choose a large aperture,
which means smaller f-stop number.
| | 01:26 | If I am shooting a landscape and want
very deep depth of field, I will choose a
| | 01:29 | small aperture, which means larger f number.
| | 01:32 | In the old days, these whole stop
apertures were all that your camera might have
| | 01:36 | offered, but digital cameras offer
apertures in 1/3rd-stop increments.
| | 01:40 | So what you will see on your
camera is a progression like this.
| | 01:45 | This aperture depth of field thing can
be a difficult thing to learn, because
| | 01:48 | you can't reason it out on your own
without knowing a lot of physics and math.
| | 01:52 | Again, over time, you will
simply learn all of this by rote.
| | 01:55 | If you wear glasses though, you have
got kind of a built-in reference card for
| | 01:59 | remembering whether smaller
apertures yield more or less depth of field.
| | 02:02 | Here is how it works.
| | 02:03 | You've got to take your glasses off,
so now I can't see anything.
| | 02:06 | If I take my finger and curl it up into
a tiny little aperture, a little hole, and
| | 02:12 | look through it, the world
will be much, much sharper.
| | 02:15 | What's going on here is I am giving
myself a tiny little aperture, and that's
| | 02:19 | dramatically increasing my depth of field.
| | 02:21 | I am actually turning my
eye into a pinhole camera.
| | 02:24 | One of the kind of defining
characteristics of pinhole photography is that
| | 02:27 | pinhole pictures have infinite depth
of field, because a tiny little aperture
| | 02:31 | gives you infinite depth of field,
and that depth of field correction is
| | 02:35 | what's allowing me to see.
| | 02:37 | But now, it's time to actually learn how
to control the aperture in your camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Aperture priority mode| 00:00 | If you have been through the Shutter
Priority lesson, this lesson ought to make
| | 00:03 | a lot of sense to you.
| | 00:04 | We are going to talk about aperture priority.
| | 00:06 | In aperture priority, I can select an
aperture that I want, and when I meter,
| | 00:11 | the camera will always select a
corresponding shutter speed that will give me a
| | 00:15 | good exposure, meaning an exposure
that is neither too bright nor too dark.
| | 00:19 | Changing my camera to Aperture Priority mode.
| | 00:22 | If you are not sure how to do that,
you ought to check out the Modes lesson.
| | 00:25 | The reason I might take control of
aperture is that aperture is how I
| | 00:29 | control depth of field.
| | 00:30 | And as you have seen, depth of field
is simply the measure of how much of
| | 00:34 | my image is in focus.
| | 00:36 | So let's take a look at our scene here.
| | 00:38 | We've got three antique cameras,
all at three different depths.
| | 00:41 | So I can choose to shoot
these in a lot of different ways.
| | 00:44 | I can have them all in focus, or I
can have just some of them in focus.
| | 00:47 | So, the key to shooting shallow depth
of field--that is, so that only some of
| | 00:52 | these things will be in focus--
is to use a wide aperture.
| | 00:54 | So I am going to dial my aperture down
as far as it will go, to f2.8. Now the max
| | 00:58 | of my aperture is going
to vary from lens to lens.
| | 01:02 | On this lens, I can get it all the way
open to F2.8. Now, that means that I am
| | 01:07 | going to have a very shallow depth of
field, meaning that after a point, things
| | 01:10 | are going to be out of focus.
| | 01:11 | That does not mean that my depth of
field starts here at the end of my lens and
| | 01:16 | maybe it goes to about here, and all of
this stuff is in focus and everything
| | 01:19 | after it is out of focus.
| | 01:22 | Depth of field is always measured
around the point of focus in your scene.
| | 01:26 | So if I focus right here, and I have
got this much depth of field, then only
| | 01:30 | these things will be in focus.
| | 01:32 | If I focus right here, and I have got
this much depth of field, then all of these
| | 01:35 | things are in focus.
| | 01:36 | But if I focus right here with this
much depth of field, I can move that depth
| | 01:40 | of field by changing my point of focus.
| | 01:42 | So I could focus here and get this,
or I could focus here and get this.
| | 01:46 | So let's take a look at that in action.
| | 01:49 | I am going to start by
focusing on the center camera.
| | 01:53 | So it focused. I have got my
aperture dialed in to F2.8, and I am going
| | 01:57 | to take the picture.
| | 01:58 | And sure enough, what I have got here
is my center camera is in focus, the rear
| | 02:03 | camera is out of focus, the
front camera is out of focus.
| | 02:06 | I have got a depth of field of maybe a
foot, maybe a little bit longer, and it's
| | 02:10 | centered right in the middle of my scene.
| | 02:12 | Everything outside of that area to
the front and back is out of focus.
| | 02:17 | So now let's try shifting
the focus to the front camera.
| | 02:20 | Now I am going to do a little trick
here that you haven't actually learned, but
| | 02:23 | you can learn about in the
"Foundation of Photography: Lenses" course.
| | 02:26 | I am using only the center
autofocus point on my camera.
| | 02:29 | I configured it that way, and so I
am setting focus on the front camera.
| | 02:33 | Here again, I have a very shallow depth of field.
| | 02:35 | My depth of field is actually as shallow
as it was before, but now it's centered
| | 02:39 | around the front camera, so the
back two cameras are out of focus.
| | 02:44 | Let's try this again, and this
time let's focus on the rear camera.
| | 02:48 | Turning the wrong knob on
my tripod there. There we go.
| | 02:51 | So I have got that focused, line up my
shot, take the picture, and t here we go.
| | 02:57 | The rear camera is in focus, the
front two cameras are out of focus.
| | 03:02 | So that's a very simple way of
shooting shallow depth of field.
| | 03:05 | Now, let's look at making our
depth of field little wider.
| | 03:08 | I am going to change my aperture.
| | 03:09 | I am going to bump it up to F8.
| | 03:11 | That's several stops higher.
| | 03:13 | And what that's going to do is
give me a wider depth of field.
| | 03:17 | That's going to give me a
depth of field about this wide.
| | 03:19 | And again, if I am focused on the
center, that's going to mean that maybe a
| | 03:23 | little bit of this camera will be in
focus, maybe the back end of this camera,
| | 03:26 | and this camera will be on focus.
Everything in here will be in focus.
| | 03:29 | Everything out should be soft.
| | 03:32 | So with my focus on the center camera,
I take my shot, and sure enough, my
| | 03:38 | center camera is in focus.
| | 03:40 | The front and rear cameras are blurry,
but they are not as blurry as they were before.
| | 03:45 | My depth of field has gotten a little wider.
| | 03:48 | Now, let's say I want everything in focus.
| | 03:50 | To do that, I am going to go up another
stop to f11. That should give me a depth
| | 03:56 | of field about this wide.
| | 03:58 | And again, if I were to focus here with
depth of field this wide that would mean
| | 04:02 | that this camera would be on focus,
and this camera would be on focus, and that
| | 04:05 | one would be out focus.
| | 04:06 | So I am going to be sure in focus on the
center, and that should get me all of this.
| | 04:10 | So my aperture is at f11.
| | 04:13 | Again, larger number means smaller aperture,
smaller aperture means more depth of field.
| | 04:17 | That's all we are doing here.
| | 04:19 | Focus on the center, take my shot
and sure enough, everything is in focus;
| | 04:24 | all three cameras are in focus.
| | 04:25 | You will also see that the table is
sharpening up on the edges because it all
| | 04:28 | fits in my depth of field.
| | 04:31 | So this is the power of depth of field control.
| | 04:34 | I can render some things
blurry, some things sharp.
| | 04:36 | This helps me control the viewer's eye.
| | 04:38 | It helps me bring attention to very
specific things in my image, which is at the
| | 04:42 | essence of good composition.
| | 04:44 | I do that by changing aperture.
| | 04:47 | Now when you are ready to go out and
shoot really deep depth of field or go out
| | 04:50 | and shoot really shallow depth of
field in trickier situations,
| | 04:53 | you will need to know a few more things,
and we will be covering those later.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lens speed| 00:00 | You've seen how aperture affects depth
of field, with wider apertures yielding
| | 00:05 | shallower depth of field.
| | 00:06 | You've also seen how to control
aperture on your camera through mode changes:
| | 00:10 | aperture priority mode, manual mode,
program shift; there are a lot of ways of
| | 00:14 | changing aperture on your camera.
| | 00:16 | If you've got several different lenses,
you may have already discovered that you
| | 00:19 | can't necessarily open every
lens up to the same wide aperture.
| | 00:23 | For example, you might have one lens
that opens up to f4 and other one that
| | 00:26 | goes much wider, maybe to 2.8. Or maybe
you've got a zoom lens, and you have
| | 00:30 | noticed that sometimes you can open it
up to one aperture and other times you
| | 00:34 | can't quite get it that wide.
| | 00:36 | There are reasons for all of that,
and you can learn all of those reasons in the
| | 00:39 | "Foundations of Photography: Lenses" course.
| | 00:42 | We go into great detail there
about why that is and how it works.
| | 00:46 | That's critical knowledge, not just
for understanding the gear that you have,
| | 00:50 | but knowing what lenses you
might want to choose in the future.
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| Shooting deep depth of field| 00:00 | By now, you should be pretty
comfortable with depth of field, and you should
| | 00:03 | know that small apertures give me deeper
depth of field. A deep depth of field
| | 00:07 | is exactly what I want right now.
| | 00:09 | I have stumbled into this beautiful
landscape shot, and what's characteristic
| | 00:13 | about landscape photography is deep focus.
| | 00:16 | Everything up close is in focus,
| | 00:18 | everything far away is in
focus, and everything in between.
| | 00:20 | That means deep depth of field.
| | 00:21 | What I've got here is I have
got this fence in the foreground.
| | 00:24 | I have got some grass in front of it.
| | 00:25 | I've got an island out on the horizon.
| | 00:27 | I'd like all of that to be as
sharp as I can possibly get it,
| | 00:30 | so I put my camera into aperture priority mode,
| | 00:33 | that gives me control of aperture.
And I dial my aperture down to f11.
| | 00:36 | Now, this camera can actually go smaller.
| | 00:38 | I can get down to f22 if I wanted to, and
a lot of people do that. They think, "oh!
| | 00:42 | I want deep depth of field.
I'll just close it down all the way."
| | 00:44 | As you learn in "Foundations of
Photography: Lenses", all lenses have an aperture
| | 00:48 | sweet spot, and if you go out of
it, your images will get soft.
| | 00:52 | I know on here that I can go to 11 and be okay.
| | 00:55 | So I have done that.
| | 00:56 | Aperture of course is critical to
depth of field control, but for shooting
| | 00:59 | depth of field, there is
something else to consider.
| | 01:01 | Remember, depth of field is
centered around the point of focus.
| | 01:04 | So if I focus here, I have depth on
either side of that, and I can move that,
| | 01:09 | expand it, shrink it whatever. But it's
all centered around my point of focus.
| | 01:12 | What that means is if I go focus on
the horizon, which is kind of what your
| | 01:16 | tendency is when you are shooting a
landscape, I am wasting a bunch of
| | 01:19 | depth of field because a lot of it is
falling behind the point of focus, and
| | 01:23 | there isn't anything behind the point of focus.
| | 01:25 | That means that a bunch of depth-of-
field that could be in front of the island
| | 01:29 | is now being wasted.
| | 01:30 | So choosing where to focus is
critical to getting deep depth of field.
| | 01:35 | So let's take a look at my shot here.
| | 01:37 | I've framed it up,
and framed the way that I want it,
| | 01:40 | I get my focus point right in the center.
| | 01:42 | I am going to go ahead and just take that shot,
| | 01:44 | but I am going to think
about something else here.
| | 01:47 | I am not sure that that's
actually going to get me enough
| | 01:50 | depth of field forward.
| | 01:51 | In general, the rule of thumb is you want
to focus about a third in to your subject.
| | 01:55 | That is a third of the distance
from the camera to the horizon.
| | 01:58 | Right now that center point is
probably a little too far back.
| | 02:01 | So I am going to tilt down to about
there, and I half-press the button to
| | 02:06 | autofocus, and then I tilt
back up, and now I take my shot.
| | 02:13 | So that might be the keeper.
| | 02:15 | That might be the shot
that I want, but I can't tell.
| | 02:17 | I don't know for sure, and you might
think, "Well, I'll just put it up on the LCD
| | 02:19 | screen and review it."
| | 02:20 | These screens aren't great at
showing focus, and we're talking about fine
| | 02:23 | degrees of sharpness.
| | 02:24 | So I am going to assume that I don't know
which one is the keeper image till I get home.
| | 02:28 | So what I am doing is I am bracketing focus.
| | 02:30 | I am shooting the same shot focused in
different places with the hope that when
| | 02:33 | I get home, one of them is going to be good.
| | 02:35 | I am going to try something else though now.
| | 02:37 | I am going to focus on the fence.
| | 02:39 | That for sure is going to get
me enough depth of field up here.
| | 02:42 | Yet, it may not get me depth of field
all the way out to the island. However,
| | 02:45 | the fence is really big in the frame.
| | 02:47 | That's the thing that people are
going to see when they look at your print.
| | 02:49 | I want to be sure it's sharp.
| | 02:51 | The island is way in the distance,
and now it's shrouded in fog.
| | 02:55 | If it's a little bit out of focus, I am
probably not going to notice that so much.
| | 02:58 | So I am willing to maybe
lose a little sharpness there.
| | 03:01 | So I am going to tilt down, focus, tilt back up.
| | 03:05 | I focused on the fence, and now
I take my shot, and there we go.
| | 03:11 | Just for the sake of experimentation on
your own, in a situation like this, try
| | 03:15 | focusing on the horizon.
| | 03:16 | It's a good exercise.
| | 03:18 | I am going to focus way out there on
the island, reframe my shot, take it, and
| | 03:23 | come home and see how much
is in focus on the grass.
| | 03:26 | That will give you an idea of
exactly how we are moving this
| | 03:29 | depth of field range around.
| | 03:30 | So when you're landscape shooting,
yes, you have to remember aperture--
| | 03:34 | small aperture for deep depth of field.
| | 03:36 | But don't just frame the shot in your
way and take it; be very careful about
| | 03:39 | where you are focusing, and aim for
focusing either about a third of the way in
| | 03:44 | or on your foreground subject. Bracket
your focus, shoot several shots focused
| | 03:49 | in different places, and odds are
one of them is going to be a keeper.
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| Shooting shallow depth of field| 00:01 | We've already talked at length about
aperture and its impact on depth of field,
| | 00:05 | the amount of depth in
the image that's in focus.
| | 00:08 | You have seen how you can make
your aperture larger to make shallower
| | 00:12 | depth of field, and that's
what we're going to do here.
| | 00:13 | We've left the studio, we are out in this
beautiful location, and I am going to
| | 00:16 | take a shot of Ben here. And I want to
blur out the background. Even though it's
| | 00:19 | this beautiful vista back there, I want
to shoot it with shallow depth of field
| | 00:23 | to bring more focus onto his face.
| | 00:25 | Now, depth of field involves--shooting
shallow depth of field involves more than
| | 00:29 | just opening your aperture up all the way.
| | 00:31 | As you're about to see, camera
position has a lot to do with the perception
| | 00:35 | of depth in a scene.
| | 00:36 | So I am going to just take a shot here.
| | 00:37 | I have got a reasonably fast lens.
| | 00:39 | I can open it up to f4.
| | 00:40 | So I have got my aperture open all the way.
| | 00:43 | Now, this is not a nice thing to do to
your friends, to get real close to them
| | 00:46 | and shoot with really wide angles.
| | 00:48 | Something we haven't talked about yet is
the effect of focal length on the sense
| | 00:52 | of depth in the scene, and you are
going to learn about that in detail in
| | 00:55 | "Foundations of Photography: Lenses".
| | 00:58 | But I am right on top of him, and to get
him framed the way, I want to have to go
| | 01:01 | to a pretty wide angle, which is not the
most flattering look, but it's going to
| | 01:05 | work well for our example.
| | 01:06 | So obviously, our wide angle here
is making him look a little goofy.
| | 01:09 | But what we are more interested
in here is the depth of field.
| | 01:12 | Yes, it's a little shallow,
but it doesn't look that shallow.
| | 01:14 | I can still see this
mountain back here and these trees.
| | 01:18 | What I would rather do is frame him
tighter so that the mountain fills more of
| | 01:23 | the back of the frame.
| | 01:24 | So to do that, I can't do
that with this wide-angle lens.
| | 01:27 | I need to zoom more in.
| | 01:29 | So to do that, I've got to come back here.
| | 01:31 | So if I come back to about here and
zoom in, what I am doing is framing him as
| | 01:36 | close as possible to the exact same way.
| | 01:38 | I want his head in about the same position.
| | 01:40 | I want the mountain back there,
and now when I take the shot, I get this.
| | 01:45 | Same aperture in both shots,
but different camera positions because of that
| | 01:48 | different focal lengths in both shots.
| | 01:50 | As you can see in this shot, it
just appears to have much shallower
| | 01:54 | depth of field, and it's kind
of an optical illusion almost.
| | 01:56 | Because the mountain is bigger in the
background, I can see much more clearly
| | 02:00 | how much it's defocusing.
| | 02:01 | It's actually defocusing
the same amount in both shots.
| | 02:04 | It's just because the background is
bigger, I can see that defocusing more
| | 02:08 | in the second shot.
| | 02:09 | So camera position and focal
length are critical to getting shallow
| | 02:13 | depth of field, because in addition
to aperture size, one of the things
| | 02:17 | that creates a sense of shallow depth of
field in the image is the size of your background.
| | 02:21 | You want background objects big enough
that you can see the defocusing, and very
| | 02:25 | often the only way to get that is to
put on a more telephoto lens and get
| | 02:28 | farther away from your subject.
| | 02:30 | So people kind of just simplify this
down to if you want shallow depth of field.
| | 02:34 | You've got to be shooting
with a longer focal length.
| | 02:37 | There's not an optical reason for that.
| | 02:39 | It's purely about just size
of objects in the background.
| | 02:42 | So when you are trying to go for those
really shallow depth-of-field images,
| | 02:46 | remember to zoom in and
position your camera appropriately.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The depth-of-field preview button| 00:00 | Having all this depth of field theory
at your disposal is great, but unless you
| | 00:04 | have got a really good eye for distance,
it can be hard to judge what might be
| | 00:07 | in focus when you are
shooting with deep depth of field.
| | 00:10 | This means it can be hard to determine
when you have chosen an aperture that's
| | 00:14 | small enough to get you the
deep depth of field that you want.
| | 00:17 | Remember too, that ideally you don't
want to close your aperture down any
| | 00:21 | further than you have to, because if you
close down, sometimes refer to stopping down,
| | 00:26 | if you close down too far, your image
might suffer a sharpness loss due to
| | 00:30 | diffraction artifacts inside your lens.
| | 00:32 | You can of course shoot a picture and
then look at it on the back of the screen
| | 00:36 | to try to determine your depth of field.
But as you may have already noticed
| | 00:39 | the screen on your camera's LCD tends to render
things in focus even when they are little soft.
| | 00:43 | This is simply because it's so small.
So images sharpen up when reduced
| | 00:47 | to fit on the screen.
| | 00:48 | Even if you zoom in, you won't
necessarily get an accurate view of focus.
| | 00:52 | Also, if you are shooting in bright
daylight, you might have trouble seeing
| | 00:54 | your screen at all.
| | 00:56 | Another option, of course, is to wheel
around the giant plasma monitor though,
| | 00:59 | that's not necessarily practical
because these things are like grocery cards:
| | 01:02 | there is always one wheel that's just a drag.
| | 01:04 | A better choice is to use your camera's
depth of field preview button if it has one.
| | 01:10 | On this camera, it's a
button that's right under here.
| | 01:12 | Now here is how it works.
| | 01:14 | If you remember back to the Aperture
video, we showed you a lens, and you saw
| | 01:19 | the iris inside, closing.
| | 01:21 | Now when your lens is on your camera,
the iris is always open all the way,
| | 01:26 | because if it's closed down at all, when
you look through the viewfinder, there
| | 01:29 | won't be enough light,
and you won't be able to see.
| | 01:30 | So the camera leaves the iris opened
all the way all the time, to let as much
| | 01:34 | light as possible through the viewfinder.
| | 01:36 | You dial in an Aperture setting,
| | 01:37 | it still doesn't change the size of the iris.
| | 01:39 | It's not until you press the shutter
button to take the shot that it closes the
| | 01:43 | iris down to your chosen
setting, and takes the picture.
| | 01:46 | So when I am looking through here, even
if I dialed in f22, which should give me
| | 01:51 | a real depth of field, what I am
getting is a wide-open aperture.
| | 01:56 | So I am always having small
or shallow depth of field.
| | 02:00 | In fact, I am in an aperture priority mode,
| | 02:01 | I am just going to dial right on up
to f16, something that may not be the
| | 02:06 | best thing in terms of overall sharpness of
the image, but we are going to risk it anyway.
| | 02:10 | So I am at f16.
| | 02:12 | That's a tiny, little aperture.
That should be very deep depth of field.
| | 02:14 | Everything in that shot should be in
focus. But as I looked through the view-
| | 02:17 | finder--and what we are seeing on the
screen here is what I would see in my
| | 02:21 | optical viewfinder--
| | 02:22 | as I look through the viewfinder,
only the middle camera is in focus.
| | 02:25 | Now remember, I have focused on the
middle camera, so that's where my depth of
| | 02:30 | field is centered around.
| | 02:31 | So plainly, it's looking like my depth
of field is not deep enough to get all
| | 02:34 | three cameras, even though I am at f16.
| | 02:37 | Now if I press the depth of field
preview button, what's going to happen is the
| | 02:40 | iris is going to close down to my chosen
setting, which in this case is f16, and
| | 02:45 | when I do that, pay attention
to the front or rear camera.
| | 02:50 | When I press the depth of field
button now, they snap into focus.
| | 02:55 | Because when I press the depth of field
button, my iris closes down and I get to
| | 02:59 | see the true depth of field in my image.
| | 03:01 | I am going to let go and I pop back up.
Here it is again, and here I am back out.
| | 03:06 | Let's go open to our wider
aperture and see what happens.
| | 03:09 | I am going to go to f11, hit
the depth of field Preview button,
| | 03:12 | take a look at the first camera.
| | 03:14 | It sharper, but it's not
as sharp as it was at f 16.
| | 03:17 | So I am seeing a change in my
depth of field as I press the depth of
| | 03:22 | field preview button.
| | 03:23 | Now what we are seeing here in
live view is not entirely an accurate
| | 03:27 | reproduction of what would you see if
you were looking through your optical view-
| | 03:30 | finder, because when you look through
the optical viewfinder, when that iris
| | 03:33 | closes down, as you press the depth of
field preview button, your viewfinder is
| | 03:37 | actually going to get darker,
because that's stopping down.
| | 03:39 | It's going to cut out a lot of light.
| | 03:41 | So if you are out in the sunlight, a
lot of times what happens is you
| | 03:44 | press the deep depth of field or the
depth of field preview button, and you
| | 03:46 | go, "Well, now I can't see."
| | 03:49 | Keep looking through the viewfinder.
Try to block out the area around the viewfinder.
| | 03:53 | In other words, you are trying to get
your eye to adjust to the new darkness.
| | 03:56 | Wait a minute, and you should
then be able to see depth of field.
| | 03:59 | Then you can take your shot.
| | 04:01 | It's still not quite as accurate a
representation as dragging around a giant
| | 04:05 | plasma display, but it's much easier to do.
| | 04:07 | In the end, if your depth of field
preview button is too hard to see in your
| | 04:11 | current live, or your camera doesn't
have one, then your best bet will be to do
| | 04:13 | what's called bracketing.
| | 04:14 | Shoot at your chosen small exposure, then
try shooting at a smaller one, just in case.
| | 04:19 | And also, remember what you saw
earlier about depth of field and focus.
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| How shallow should you be?| 00:01 | By now, you should be getting
comfortable with the idea that you don't always
| | 00:04 | want everything in your frame in focus.
| | 00:07 | But shooting with a shallow depth
of field is a great way to bring more
| | 00:10 | attention to your subject.
| | 00:11 | Depth of field can also sometimes bring a
less harsh, dreamier atmosphere to a shot.
| | 00:15 | But when it comes time to shoot
shallow depth of field, it can be
| | 00:18 | very tempting to simply open your aperture
up as far as it will go and start shooting.
| | 00:22 | However, depending on the speed of your
lens--that is, depending on how wide its
| | 00:27 | aperture can open--this
may not be the best idea.
| | 00:30 | There are two possible
issues when you are shooting wide.
| | 00:33 | First, if you are shooting with a very
wide aperture, your depth of field can go
| | 00:37 | shallow enough that it can be
difficult to ensure focus where you want it.
| | 00:40 | For example, in this image, which I
shot at f1.2, the depth of field is so
| | 00:46 | shallow that if I focus on one eye,
the other eye is out of focus.
| | 00:50 | This is an extremely shallow depth of
field that can be difficult to work with,
| | 00:53 | unless you have a time to
really go slow and check your focus.
| | 00:57 | Anytime you are shooting a portrait,
it's always best to ensure that your focus
| | 01:01 | point is centered on your subject's eyes.
| | 01:03 | The eyes are the most critical thing in
a portrait, and as long as they are in
| | 01:06 | focus, it won't matter if
the rest of the image is soft.
| | 01:09 | In a case of extreme shallow depth of
field, like this, if the eyes are off-axis
| | 01:14 | to you--that is if the subject is
turned in a way so that one eye is closer to
| | 01:18 | the lens than another--then you need to
either move yourself so that both eyes
| | 01:22 | are perpendicular to the lens, ask your
subject to turn, or switch to a smaller
| | 01:25 | aperture to deepen your depth of field.
| | 01:28 | As you open wider, your depth of
field will get shallower and shallower.
| | 01:31 | So before you open up all the way, you
want to think about how abstract you want
| | 01:35 | the background to go.
| | 01:36 | For example, this image was shot at f2.8.
| | 01:40 | The background is soft, but it's not
completely smeary, unlike this image,
| | 01:44 | which was shot at f1.2.
| | 01:46 | It's so soft that objects in the
background are actually larger because they
| | 01:50 | have been smeared to cover a larger area.
| | 01:53 | Note also that the quality of the
highlights in the background have changed.
| | 01:56 | Here they are small round circles.
| | 01:59 | Here they are oblong and no longer very bright.
| | 02:02 | Believe it or not, there is actually
an aesthetic for the quality of the
| | 02:05 | defocusing and blurring that is created
when a lens is opened to wide apertures.
| | 02:09 | Bokeh is a Japanese term that refers to
the quality of the soft background, and
| | 02:14 | typically what people focus on most
with Bokeh is the shape and definition of
| | 02:18 | the types of highlights that we just saw.
| | 02:21 | The shape of these highlights is
partly dependent on the number of blades in
| | 02:24 | the iris of your lens.
| | 02:25 | More blades should mean rounder highlights.
| | 02:27 | If shallow depth of field is a regular
part of your shooting repertoire, you
| | 02:31 | want to give a thought to the Bokeh of the lens.
| | 02:33 | Is it buttery smooth or
filled with spiky highlights?
| | 02:37 | And then when you take that lens out
shooting, give some thought to how shallow
| | 02:40 | is too shallow, and pay attention to
how background details are affected by
| | 02:45 | your aperture changes.
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| Exercise: Go work with aperture| 00:00 | When you first get started
trying to work with aperture, you're
| | 00:03 | probably going to find yourself a
little confused in having to really think
| | 00:06 | through things a lot.
| | 00:07 | You are going to stop and set up your
shot, and probably have to think, "Okay, is
| | 00:11 | a bigger aperture more or less depth of
field, and is a bigger number or bigger
| | 00:15 | or smaller aperture?"
| | 00:17 | Don't worry about that. After
practice, you are going to learn that by rote.
| | 00:20 | And speaking of practice, now is a
good time to get out there and try some
| | 00:24 | depth-of-field practice.
| | 00:25 | So what should you do? It's pretty
simple. Just go look for shallow depth-
| | 00:29 | of-field situations.
| | 00:30 | Find someone to shot a portrait of.
| | 00:32 | Remember that you are going to be using a
big aperture, which means a smaller number.
| | 00:36 | You are going to be trying to ensure, in
your shallow depth of field work, that
| | 00:39 | there is something large in the
background to reveal your shallow depth of
| | 00:42 | field. Then try and take the same
shot with deeper depth of field.
| | 00:46 | Also, go out and try and find some
shots that benefit specifically from deep
| | 00:50 | depth of field, like a nice landscape shot.
| | 00:52 | Remember, with those, you are going to
be needing a smaller aperture, which is a
| | 00:55 | bigger number, and you are going to
have to think about where to focus to be
| | 00:57 | sure that your depth of
field is being maximized.
| | 01:01 | There is more to understanding depth
of field than simply knowing which buttons
| | 01:05 | to press and which settings to dial.
You need to develop an
| | 01:08 | aesthetic for when you need shallow
and when you might be better served with
| | 01:12 | deeper depth of field.
| | 01:13 | One of the best ways to do that
obviously is practicing with your own shots, but
| | 01:16 | also start paying attention to it
in other shots that you see, both in still
| | 01:20 | photos, in maybe fine art photos or
advertising photos, but also pay attention
| | 01:24 | to it in movies and TV shows that you watch.
| | 01:26 | All these same things apply there,
and same aesthetics apply there.
| | 01:29 | Try and start noticing when a
photographer, or in a TV show, or in a movie, where
| | 01:34 | the depth of field has been
intentionally shortened and then stop and think
| | 01:37 | about how they might have done that.
| | 01:39 | So, this is your chance to go get
some depth of field practice before we
| | 01:42 | move on.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Working with ISOISO: The third exposure parameter | 00:00 | By now, you should be very comfortable
with shutter speed, aperture, and metering.
| | 00:05 | You should know to read shutter speed
and aperture settings--how to change them,
| | 00:08 | and you should understand what impact
particular settings have on your image.
| | 00:12 | And of course, you should
have been practicing--a lot.
| | 00:15 | I am going to be honest with you now, though.
| | 00:17 | I have been holding out on you.
| | 00:19 | There is actually a third exposure
parameter called ISO, and it's truly the key to
| | 00:25 | solving some difficult exposure problems.
| | 00:27 | But it is very important that you have
this aperture and shutter speed thing
| | 00:30 | under your belt before we move
on to ISO, but now you are ready.
| | 00:34 | ISO is a measure of the
sensitivity of your image sensor.
| | 00:38 | If you have a film background, then you are
probably already familiar with ISO as a
| | 00:42 | measure of film sensitivity--sometimes
referred to as film speed--and you may even
| | 00:46 | remember ISO being referred to as ASA.
| | 00:48 | ISO is the same thing.
| | 00:50 | By default, your camera is
probably set to an ISO of 100 or 200.
| | 00:54 | So take a look at our set here.
| | 00:57 | We have got a new smattering of antique cameras
arrayed, and I want to take a picture of them.
| | 01:01 | Now, for the sake of example, I am going
to say that I don't have a tripod here.
| | 01:05 | Let's say I stumbled into this scene
while I was out walking around shooting
| | 01:08 | hand-held, and I am ready to take a shot of it.
| | 01:11 | So I am lining up my shot, and I am
half-pressing my Shutter button to meter.
| | 01:16 | Take a look at my shutter speed down there;
| | 01:18 | it's saying somewhere between a 10th and
a 15th of a second. That's way too slow
| | 01:22 | for hand-held shooting.
| | 01:24 | Now, in previous lessons, we told you
that what you can do in that situation is
| | 01:28 | stabilize your camera and assume a
good position, and that's all always true--
| | 01:33 | you should always be trying to shoot as
stably as possible--but still, a 10th
| | 01:36 | of a second is too slow.
| | 01:38 | So what I am going to do is
increase the ISO on my camera.
| | 01:41 | I am going to dial it up from 100 to 400,
and now when I meter, I see I
| | 01:46 | am at a 45th of a second.
| | 01:47 | I am going to dial it up a little farther.
| | 01:50 | I am going to go to 800,
and now I am at a 90th of a second.
| | 01:53 | That's plenty for hand-held shooting.
| | 01:54 | I can take my shot.
| | 01:56 | As ISO increases, it takes your
camera less time to gather light.
| | 02:02 | This means that you can get away with
shorter shutter speeds, which is what
| | 02:04 | just happened here.
| | 02:05 | Here is how it works.
| | 02:06 | When data is first read off of your
cameras image sensor, it's in the form of
| | 02:10 | tiny, little electrical charges.
| | 02:12 | Before those charges can be analyzed,
they have to be amplified, because they are
| | 02:15 | very minute signals.
| | 02:17 | When you increase the ISO setting on
your camera, all you are doing is turning
| | 02:20 | up that amplification.
| | 02:22 | Now, because it is more amplified,
weaker light levels are more significant,
| | 02:26 | so you can get away with less light, which
means shorter exposure times or smaller apertures.
| | 02:30 | Now think about what happens when
you turn up the volume on your stereo.
| | 02:34 | As you amplify the sound more, it gets louder,
but you'll also hear more noise, a hissy sound.
| | 02:40 | Electrical components in your amplifier,
other gizmos in your house, cosmic rays
| | 02:45 | passing through the room--these all
generate electrical noise, and as you
| | 02:48 | amplify your sound, you also amplify
that noise, and so you hear a noisy hiss as
| | 02:53 | your volume gets louder.
| | 02:55 | Your image sensor works exactly the same way.
| | 02:57 | As you increase the amplification of
the signals that come off the sensor,
| | 03:01 | you exaggerate any noise that the
sensor might have recorded from the other
| | 03:04 | electrical components in the camera, or
those cosmic rays that might be passing by.
| | 03:09 | And you find that that noise will
appear in your image, as speckle-y patterns
| | 03:13 | that look like this.
| | 03:15 | Now how much noise will be generated
will depend on your camera, and we'll talk
| | 03:19 | later about assessing
your camera's noise response.
| | 03:21 | Obviously, you'd prefer not
to have noise in your images,
| | 03:25 | so you should always try to
keep ISO as low as possible.
| | 03:28 | That said, the ability to change ISO
from shot to shot is one of the great
| | 03:32 | advantages of digital over film, and something
can really nag films norms about. Here is why.
| | 03:38 | First of all, as you have seen, when I
get into a situation where I am trying to
| | 03:42 | shoot hand-held, and the light is so
low that I can't because my shutter speed
| | 03:46 | will go too low and my images will be
shaky, all I have to do is turn up my ISO.
| | 03:50 | Now, take a look at these standard ISO numbers.
| | 03:53 | Each one is double the previous.
| | 03:56 | Now you should know by now that what
that means is each one is one stop apart.
| | 04:01 | So if I meter a scene at ISO 100,
and my camera recommends a shutter speed of
| | 04:05 | 1/30th of a second--a speed that's a
little too low for hand-held shooting--then I
| | 04:09 | can turn my ISO from 100 to 200,
which is a difference of one stop.
| | 04:14 | One stop is a doubling of light,
and that means my sensor is now twice as
| | 04:18 | sensitive to light,
| | 04:19 | so when I meter now, my
camera chooses a 60th of a second.
| | 04:23 | With that single shift, I am back in
the realm of safe hand-held shooting.
| | 04:26 | Well, now let's say my subject is moving,
and I am afraid that a 60th of a second
| | 04:30 | is too slow to freeze their action.
| | 04:32 | I can dial from 200 to 400, and my
shutter speed will go from 1/60th to 1/125th.
| | 04:38 | I know 60 times two is actually 120,
but 1/125th is a kind of standard shutter
| | 04:43 | speed that got established
long ago, and that's what we use.
| | 04:46 | Raising from 400 to 800 will get me
to 1/250th of a second, and so on.
| | 04:51 | In other words, ISO has a reciprocal
relationship to your other exposure
| | 04:55 | parameters, so you can use it to
buy yourself more exposure latitude.
| | 04:58 | This is great for low-light shooting,
but not just because it's simply let's
| | 05:03 | you shoot in the dark.
| | 05:04 | Say you are shooting at dusk,
and you really want deep depth of field.
| | 05:07 | Unfortunately, it's just dark enough
that when you close your aperture down to
| | 05:11 | get that deep depth of field, your
shutter speed then slows down to something
| | 05:14 | too low for hand-held shooting.
| | 05:15 | Raise your ISO, and you get your
shutter speed back, and so you can shoot with
| | 05:19 | the shallow depth of field that you want.
| | 05:21 | Your camera probably has an ISO range
that goes from 100 to 600, but it may go
| | 05:26 | farther, or it may stop at 400.
| | 05:29 | It may also be divided into fractional
ISOs, like you can see here. These are
| | 05:34 | one-third-stop interval ISOs,
| | 05:36 | just the way that you saw one-
third-stop apertures and shutter speeds.
| | 05:42 | Your camera may also have an auto ISO feature.
| | 05:44 | When ISO is set to auto, your camera is
free to make ISO adjustments when it's
| | 05:50 | making other exposure calculations.
And sometimes you'll find that your camera,
| | 05:54 | rather than slowing down shutter
speed, will increase ISO instead.
| | 05:59 | This is your camera trying to protect
you from getting too slow a shutter speed.
| | 06:03 | Your auto ISO mechanism will not
necessarily use the full ISO range of your
| | 06:08 | camera, so if you are going into a low
light situation, and you know your camera
| | 06:12 | can do well at ISO 1600, you may need to
set it specifically to 1600, because the
| | 06:17 | auto mechanism may not be
willing to go that high.
| | 06:19 | But what you really need to know next is
how far you can push ISO before you get
| | 06:24 | an image that's unacceptably noisy.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Assessing your camera's high ISO | 00:00 | The ability to change ISO on a shot-by
-shot basis will get you out of a lot
| | 00:04 | of situations where your shutter
speed would otherwise be too slow for
| | 00:08 | hand-held shooting.
| | 00:09 | But you'll pay a noise
penalty as you increase ISO,
| | 00:12 | so you don't want it to go
any higher than you have to.
| | 00:14 | Therefore, before you go out shooting
and wantonly raising your ISO, you want an
| | 00:19 | idea of how much noise you'll suffer
in your images as ISO increases, and you
| | 00:24 | can easily figure this out
by taking some test shots.
| | 00:27 | Grab your camera and find a
low-light situation--just go out at night.
| | 00:31 | Put your camera in program mode,
set the ISO to its lowest setting--
| | 00:36 | usually 100 or 200--and shoot a scene.
| | 00:39 | Now raise your ISO by one
stop--that is, one doubling.
| | 00:43 | So if you are at 100, you go to 200.
| | 00:45 | Shoot the same scene, same framing.
| | 00:47 | Now work your way through each of your
full-stop ISO increments, so that's going
| | 00:52 | to be 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600.
| | 00:55 | Your camera might even go higher, 3200,
6400, 12,500. It might even go more than that.
| | 01:02 | Shoot the same shot at each one of the
ISO's. Now, find the brighter situation.
| | 01:07 | There will be times when you might
raise ISO in brighter lights simply because
| | 01:11 | you need some more aperture
or shutter-speed latitude.
| | 01:13 | Maybe you want to close down the
aperture very far or shoot with an
| | 01:17 | extremely fast shutter speed.
| | 01:18 | So it's good to have an idea of how your
camera will fair in brighter light as well.
| | 01:22 | So find a bright scene and shoot an
image at each one of your ISO settings.
| | 01:27 | Now you are ready to take those images
into your image editor and evaluate the noise.
| | 01:33 | Okay, these are our low-light, high ISO images.
| | 01:36 | Let's see what we have got here.
| | 01:37 | This was shot at ISO 200.
| | 01:39 | Now at ISO 200 in this situation, I had
to do a 20-second exposure, and at 20
| | 01:44 | seconds I have got a soft image.
| | 01:45 | I was on a tripod, and if you look, you'll
see that the horizon is sharp, so I wasn't
| | 01:49 | getting camera shake, but the boats
were bobbing around in the water and so in
| | 01:52 | 20 seconds they are blurred out.
And meanwhile fortunately, the earth continued
| | 01:56 | to turn while I was shooting, so the
moon and the stars are a little smeared out.
| | 02:00 | But we are not worried about sharpness here;
| | 02:01 | we are worried about noise. And at ISO 200,
I have got very little noise to speak
| | 02:06 | off; even if I zoom in to 100% here,
there is no problem with noise at ISO 200.
| | 02:11 | This particular camera can also go
down to ISO 100, which would have been a 40-
| | 02:16 | second exposure, so it
would have been even blurrier.
| | 02:18 | So if 200 is safe, with ISO 100
certainly would be. Let's go on up to 100.
| | 02:23 | Again, a 10-second exposure, so we
are getting a little bit of motion shake,
| | 02:27 | but overall still very, very clean.
Not going to worry about noise with this
| | 02:31 | image. Moving on to ISO 800.
| | 02:33 | All right, now we are staring to get
somewhere noise-wise, and it's not a great
| | 02:37 | place that we are getting to.
| | 02:39 | This image is a little bit chunkier.
| | 02:40 | You can start to see some
kind of bands happening here.
| | 02:43 | There is a dark band here, a light band here.
| | 02:46 | If I zoom in, you can see that not
only do we have an increase in speckling--
| | 02:50 | that is, an increase in luminance noise--
| | 02:52 | we also have these green and magenta patterns;
| | 02:55 | that's chrominance noise.
| | 02:57 | Now, normally we don't mind luminance
noise because it just looks like film grain.
| | 03:01 | It can actually be kind of
attractive and atmospheric.
| | 03:04 | Chrominance noise though, is--I
don't know. It looks a little more digital.
| | 03:07 | It's not that pretty, and
is really hard to remove.
| | 03:10 | That said, we are looking at this
image at 100%, which means we are looking
| | 03:14 | at individual pixels.
| | 03:16 | In an image with 10 mega pixels or 8 mega
pixels or more, an individual pixel is tiny.
| | 03:21 | If you were to print it, it would be invisible.
| | 03:24 | So I am not going to worry too much about
what's happening here with individual pixels.
| | 03:27 | Nevertheless, there is enough noise here
that I am probably going to want to do a
| | 03:30 | test print of this image to see if 800
is actually usable, because these color
| | 03:34 | splotches and these bands
might actually be visible.
| | 03:38 | So let's go on up now to ISO 1600,
and now things are really starting to
| | 03:42 | get kind of chunky.
| | 03:44 | Here's 800, 1600, 800, 1600.
| | 03:47 | The bands are becoming more visible.
| | 03:50 | You can see lots of colored patterns here.
| | 03:52 | We are on the verge of possibly an
image that's getting frustratingly noisy.
| | 03:57 | But again, evaluating on-screen it's
difficult to tell how things are going
| | 04:01 | to show up in print.
| | 04:02 | If your goal is to print
4 x 6, this image might be fine.
| | 04:05 | This is a case where we are
going to need to do a test print.
| | 04:08 | Moving on to 3200, and now we
are into full-on noise land.
| | 04:12 | We have lost detail here, and here.
I know there wasn't a lot of detail on the
| | 04:17 | moon, but the image is just starting
to break up, and it's starting to become
| | 04:20 | dominated by these magenta pixels.
| | 04:22 | This is bad chrominance
noise, bad luminance noise too.
| | 04:25 | So 3200, this noise is
probably going to show up in print.
| | 04:29 | So 3200 is probably beyond where we
want to go with this camera--at least in
| | 04:34 | very low light like this.
| | 04:35 | Again, I would want to do prints at my
chosen output size and evaluate my noise
| | 04:39 | there also, and try to
come up with an upper limit.
| | 04:43 | What I am going to say about this camera
right now is 1600 is definitely a usable ISO.
| | 04:47 | But if you can, you want to avoid
going beyond 800 on this camera.
| | 04:52 | Now this is purely just for low-light
situations. I would want to do this same
| | 04:55 | test in brighter light.
| | 04:57 | You may think, well, why would I be
cranking up the ISO in bright light?
| | 05:01 | Well, as we have discussed, there will
be times when you want to buy yourself
| | 05:03 | more shutter speed or aperture
latitude, and so you'll increase the ISO.
| | 05:08 | So do these experiments with you
camera and see what you can find.
| | 05:11 | Remember, don't get hung up on
individual pixels at 100%. Take some time to
| | 05:15 | do some prints. Or evaluate your
image in whatever way you are ultimately
| | 05:18 | going to be outputting it.
| | 05:19 | If that's a 640 x 480 image that you're
going to e-mail to someone, then resize
| | 05:24 | some images to that size and see how
your noise holds up, and try to figure out
| | 05:28 | what your upper usable
noise limit is on your camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Shooting in low light | 00:00 | The ability to shoot in low light is
one of the truly great advantages of
| | 00:04 | digital photography.
| | 00:06 | Digital image sensors are so sensitive
to light that you can shoot images that
| | 00:09 | simply would not have been possible with film.
| | 00:12 | If you are not used to taking your
camera out at night, you really should start.
| | 00:15 | The world looks very different when
illuminated by moonlight or streetlights,
| | 00:19 | and you might find subject matter
that you've never noticed before.
| | 00:22 | Now obviously, when you are shooting
in low light, you will need to raise your
| | 00:25 | ISO to try to get your shutter speed
up to something reasonable for hand-held
| | 00:29 | shooting, and that means you will
have to know how high you can go with ISO
| | 00:33 | before you hit unacceptable noise levels.
| | 00:35 | Bear in mind that when you're in
low light your camera will most likely open you
| | 00:39 | aperture as far as it will go,
which means depth of field will go down.
| | 00:43 | If you need deeper depth of field,
then you'll need to switch to aperture
| | 00:46 | priority mode and set your
depth of field where you want it.
| | 00:49 | Now this will cause your shutter speed
to slow down, so you might need a tripod.
| | 00:54 | Because of their low-light ability,
digital cameras are also great for shooting
| | 00:57 | concerts and performances,
assuming your have permission.
| | 01:00 | When shooting a concert or
performance, you'll face a few issues.
| | 01:03 | First, stage lighting is usually colored,
so white balance will be a challenge.
| | 01:07 | Just leave your camera on auto
white balance or shoot in RAW.
| | 01:10 | If you get home and find that your
images have a bunch of weird red and green
| | 01:14 | light in them, that's probably because
there were just red or green lighting,
| | 01:16 | and there is really nothing you can do about it.
| | 01:18 | You are going to have to give up on
getting really normal-looking flesh tones.
| | 01:22 | Second, if you are trying to
shoot something that's moving--
| | 01:25 | a musician or a performer--then you might
find you have trouble freezing your motion.
| | 01:29 | Now motion control is a
function of shutter speed.
| | 01:32 | So when you're shooting a concert or
performance, you are going to want to be in
| | 01:34 | shutter priority mode.
| | 01:36 | Start with a shutter speed
that's going to be good enough for
| | 01:38 | hand-held shooting,
| | 01:39 | so maybe like a 30th or a 60th of a second.
| | 01:42 | At that speed, if something is moving
very quickly, it's still probably going
| | 01:45 | to be a little blurry.
| | 01:46 | So from there you can try
increasing your shutter speed.
| | 01:50 | Now, if something is moving very quick,
you may find that if you've increased
| | 01:54 | shutter speed to the point where you
can actually freeze that, your image is
| | 01:57 | going to be too dark.
| | 01:58 | That's okay. Take it anyway.
| | 02:00 | You might be able to brighten
it up in your image editor later.
| | 02:03 | To work around this and to give
yourself a safety net, bracket your shots.
| | 02:07 | Take some at a shutter speed that's
good for hand-held shooting, and then take
| | 02:11 | some that are a little bit underexposed.
| | 02:13 | One of those will probably work out well.
| | 02:15 | Another way to get around objects, or
people that are moving too fast to freeze:
| | 02:19 | simply don't shoot them.
| | 02:20 | Shoot other performers on the
stage. Shoot their reactions.
| | 02:23 | It's best to not to try to tell the
story of the performance you're shooting,
| | 02:27 | because that's going to lead you to
shooting wide shots where we can't see very
| | 02:30 | much and where you have
more motion control issues.
| | 02:32 | So if you're really focusing on
close-ups of performers, especially ones
| | 02:35 | that aren't moving too fast,
you'll probably be okay.
| | 02:37 | They will warn you ahead of time, but you
want to be sure that your flash is not firing.
| | 02:42 | Now, if you're in a priority mode, if
you're in shutter or aperture priority
| | 02:45 | mode, your flash will never
automatically pop up, so that's not a problem.
| | 02:49 | Just be sure that you never go into full
auto mode, where it could come up on its own.
| | 02:54 | Also, you want to turn the beep on your
camera off, so that it doesn't disturb
| | 02:57 | people around you, and you probably
want to turn of the image review--that is,
| | 03:01 | you don't want image is popping up on
the screen after you shoot a picture
| | 03:04 | because that messes up
everyone's low-light vision.
| | 03:08 | Permission is a very important
issue when you're shooting concerts and
| | 03:10 | performances: not only do you need the
permission of the performers; you might
| | 03:15 | need the permission of the owners of the hall.
| | 03:17 | A lot of times performance halls are
union spaces that you're not allowed to
| | 03:21 | shoot in unless you're a member of the union.
| | 03:23 | Obviously, all of these techniques
take practice, but you should find that
| | 03:27 | low light should never be an
impediment to good shooting.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exercise: Shooting in low light | 00:00 | The most common use for ISO
adjustment is when you're shooting in low light.
| | 00:04 | When light dims, you need to raise ISO
to ensure a faster shutter speed that's
| | 00:09 | quick enough to prevent camera shake.
| | 00:11 | However, there is a price
to pay for raising your ISO.
| | 00:15 | As ISO increases, your
image will possibly get noisier.
| | 00:18 | So unfortunately, you can't just
set your ISO as high as it will go.
| | 00:22 | Instead, you always want to use the
lowest ISO that you can get away with.
| | 00:27 | Noise response varies from camera to camera,
| | 00:29 | so hopefully you've tested yours
already and have good idea of what the
| | 00:32 | maximum ISO setting is that you're
comfortable with, in terms of final noise in your image.
| | 00:37 | Now it's time to do some shooting.
| | 00:39 | Head into some low-light situations.
| | 00:41 | I don't mean that you have to go out
on dark streets, although that's fine.
| | 00:44 | But even the inside of your own house can get
dark enough to cause shutter-speed problems.
| | 00:48 | Find some locations that drop your
shutter speed too low and practice controlling
| | 00:52 | your ISO to get usable results.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. White BalanceWhite balance controls| 00:00 | The auto white balance features
on most cameras are very good;
| | 00:03 | however, there will still be
times when they may not yield the most
| | 00:06 | accurate color reproduction.
| | 00:08 | For example, a mixed-lighting situation,
sunlight streaming into a fluorescently
| | 00:12 | lit room, that type of situation can
often confuse the auto white balance
| | 00:16 | feature on your camera.
| | 00:17 | Fortunately, your camera also has
manual overrides for white balance.
| | 00:21 | By default, your camera will be set to auto.
| | 00:24 | Auto white balance mechanisms try to
guess at what the best white balance is
| | 00:27 | for your current light.
| | 00:29 | At the simplest level, they might do this
by finding the brightest thing in the
| | 00:32 | scene--a bright highlight
glinting off of metal, for example.
| | 00:35 | They assume that's white, and then
they will analyze that area and choose a
| | 00:39 | white balance setting that
will reproduce that as white.
| | 00:42 | Now that may not always work.
| | 00:45 | If you were shooting some scene with a
very heavy color cast, a white specular
| | 00:50 | highlight might actually have a color
cast to it, and that can throw off an auto
| | 00:54 | white balance mechanism.
| | 00:55 | Some cameras have more advanced mechanisms.
| | 00:58 | For the most part, auto white balance
will serve you very well for any normal
| | 01:03 | type of lighting situation. Mixed lighting
and shade can get you into trouble, and
| | 01:08 | that's why you have some manual overrides.
| | 01:10 | The simplest manual overrides are simply
white balance presets that are designed
| | 01:14 | for shooting under specific types of light.
| | 01:16 | We have a very simple set here;
| | 01:17 | we have got some nicely
colored flowers, sitting on a table.
| | 01:21 | This is what my camera is delivering with
auto white balance, and it looks pretty good.
| | 01:25 | The thing to remember about white
balance is that it's aiming for accurate color.
| | 01:29 | It's not necessarily aiming
for the aesthetic that you want.
| | 01:32 | In this image, you might want your
image a little warmer, or a little cooler,
| | 01:35 | but it's best to start with accurate
color because you can warm things up or
| | 01:39 | cool things down later. But it's very
difficult, if color is off, to do a warming
| | 01:44 | or cooling that looks good if you
don't start with accurate color.
| | 01:48 | So this is on auto white balance,
and it's doing things pretty well.
| | 01:50 | Watch what happens if I
pull out my White Balance menu.
| | 01:53 | I get all these little icons, and these
are pretty typical icons for different
| | 01:56 | white balance presets.
| | 01:57 | If I switch to Daylight white balance,
which is a little sun, you can see from
| | 02:03 | Auto to Daylight I don't get a huge
change. The image gets a little bit cooler,
| | 02:06 | and by cooler I mean it goes a little more blue.
| | 02:09 | Shade is not a huge
difference. Neither is Cloudy.
| | 02:14 | Our lights in here are balanced or set up
to work to be the same color as daylight,
| | 02:19 | so it's not that unusual that
changing between these three and Auto--
| | 02:23 | it's not that strange that is not
making that much of a difference.
| | 02:26 | Watch what happens though when I go to Tungsten.
| | 02:28 | My image gets very, very blue.
| | 02:30 | Now what's happening here is the
camera is assuming that I am shooting under
| | 02:33 | tungsten light, and it's recalibrated
itself for tungsten. Unfortunately, I am
| | 02:38 | not under tungsten, and so
my colors are all wrong.
| | 02:40 | This is what going to happen
when your white balance is off.
| | 02:43 | Similarly, I could be in auto mode and
shooting in some kind of light where auto
| | 02:48 | can't calculate things right.
| | 02:49 | I might get something that looks like this.
| | 02:51 | Moving on, this is White florescent.
| | 02:53 | Some cameras will have several
different florescent presets because there are
| | 02:57 | different types of florescent lights.
| | 02:59 | This is also a little bit blue.
And then Flash White balance,
| | 03:03 | if you are working with your flash, you know
you are going to be working with your flash,
| | 03:06 | sometimes switching over to flash
white balance will make a difference.
| | 03:09 | I rarely find that it
does a better job than auto.
| | 03:12 | This is a completely manual white
balance that we are going to discuss in a later
| | 03:16 | movie, and then finally,
there is this big K over here.
| | 03:19 | Lights are measured on a Kelvin scale,
so if I know the temperature of my light in
| | 03:25 | degrees Kelvin, I can
actually just dial that in by hand.
| | 03:28 | So we are set to 4300 here.
| | 03:30 | I can go up here closer to where daylight is.
| | 03:34 | So if you know for sure that temperature
of your light, you can dial that in there.
| | 03:38 | Your camera may or may not have that feature.
| | 03:40 | So the most important thing to know
about white balance is that it's something
| | 03:44 | you need to pay attention to.
| | 03:45 | So, just as you had to develop the habit
of half-pressing the shutter button and
| | 03:49 | taking note of your shutter speed, you
really need to develop a habit of paying
| | 03:53 | attention to when you're changing
the type of light that you're under.
| | 03:56 | I am here under daylight lighting
here. If I go outside into a fluorescently
| | 04:00 | lit room to take a picture, I have to be
aware that my lighting has changed and
| | 04:04 | that that might compromise my white balance.
| | 04:06 | Now a lot of people when they think
about white balance, they go, "Oh, I'll fix
| | 04:09 | it in my image editor."
| | 04:11 | Fixing a bad white balance is an edit
that just almost next to impossible to
| | 04:15 | pull off, unless you're shooting in
RAW, which we'll talk about later.
| | 04:18 | You don't want to think of your image
editor as a crutch for bad white balance.
| | 04:22 | If you look at, again, at one of these
bad white balances, this blue cast that we
| | 04:29 | have got, it has gone through
every color tone that we have.
| | 04:34 | The red is a little too blue, the
yellow is little too blue, but it's gone
| | 04:37 | in varying degrees.
| | 04:38 | Thinking well, I will just pull some blue out,
| | 04:39 | it's not actually going to get your
image back to where it needs to be, and
| | 04:43 | it will mean that you've already
edited your image a whole bunch before
| | 04:46 | you even get to any other edits that you want,
and that can lead to more problems later.
| | 04:49 | So it's critical that when you come
into a situation that you know your
| | 04:54 | auto white balance can't handle, that you take
action and switch to a manual white balance.
| | 04:59 | Now if you want, you can sit down with
your auto white balance mode and test it
| | 05:03 | out in different lightings,
try and find its weak spots.
| | 05:05 | And one of the most--one of the times
you'll most often make a white balance
| | 05:08 | trouble is you go into a situation
like shade or tungsten lighting, where
| | 05:12 | maybe you're feeling confident because
well, my auto white balance doesn't work
| | 05:15 | very well in shade.
| | 05:16 | I am switching to Shade white
balance and taking some pictures. Great!
| | 05:18 | I am on my way, and you
forget to change it back to auto.
| | 05:22 | So try and also develop the habit of
if you have made a white balance change,
| | 05:25 | put it back on auto after you're done.
| | 05:27 | That will save you from shooting back
in, say, daylight with a bad white balance.
| | 05:32 | There is more manual white balance
control you can take, and we will look at
| | 05:35 | that in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting white balance manually| 00:00 | You have seen that white balance is
the key to getting accurate color in your
| | 00:03 | images, and you have probably already
discovered that auto white balance does a
| | 00:06 | pretty good job most of the time.
| | 00:08 | In bright daylight, tungsten light,
several different kinds of fluorescent
| | 00:11 | light--even in mixed lighting situations--
auto white balance can do a good job of
| | 00:15 | figuring out a white balance
setting that will give you good color.
| | 00:18 | What can trip up white
balance on many cameras is shade.
| | 00:23 | So it's going to vary from camera to camera.
| | 00:25 | You are going to want to check it out on yours.
| | 00:27 | Let me show you what I mean though.
| | 00:28 | I am going to take a portrait of Samara here,
and let's start which my exposure settings.
| | 00:33 | I am on auto white balance.
| | 00:35 | I want to blur out the background, so
that's going to mean a wide aperture.
| | 00:38 | So I am aperture priority mode.
| | 00:40 | I have opened my lens up all the way to f 4.
| | 00:43 | That's as wide open as I go
on this particular lens.
| | 00:45 | When I meter that, I get a
shutter speed of a 45th of a second.
| | 00:49 | That's little slow for someone who is just
trying to stand there for a long while I talk.
| | 00:53 | So I am going to up my ISO.
| | 00:56 | If I take my ISO up ISO 400, that buys
me two stops, which gets me up to a 180th.
| | 01:01 | That's going to be good for
really making sure that she is sharp.
| | 01:05 | So let me take the shot, and here you
can see we've got a white balance problem.
| | 01:12 | Now, you may not spot it right away. You may go,
| | 01:14 | "Well, I don't know. That looks okay."
| | 01:16 | Your eye is constantly
correcting the color that you are seeing.
| | 01:19 | Let me show you what it looks like if
we switch to a different white balance.
| | 01:22 | Right now, she doesn't have
a lot of warmth in her skin.
| | 01:24 | She has got a kind of cold
pallor that we want to get rid of.
| | 01:28 | So I am going to switch my camera's
white balance over to shady white balance
| | 01:33 | and take another shot.
| | 01:36 | This is already looking much better.
Look at the difference.
| | 01:38 | She is much warmer.
Her skin actually has some color to it.
| | 01:41 | She is starting to look a little
orange though, and that may be because the
| | 01:44 | shade preset on this particular camera just
isn't right for this particular type of shade.
| | 01:50 | Depending on how much coverage there is,
what time of day it is, we can have a
| | 01:54 | lot of variations from one
type of shade to another.
| | 01:55 | So I am going to switch to another
white balance preset. And as you have seen
| | 01:59 | already, these presets are simply the
camera manufactures idea of what a correct
| | 02:05 | white balance setting is
for particular circumstances.
| | 02:07 | I am now in cloudy white balance.
| | 02:09 | So let's take an example
of that. This is better.
| | 02:14 | She is still little bit too orange.
| | 02:15 | So what I want to do now is
switch to a full manual white balance.
| | 02:19 | Again, these presets are the factory
ideas of what is a good white balance
| | 02:22 | setting for a particular situation,
but let's actually just build a white balance for
| | 02:26 | this exact situation.
| | 02:28 | Most cameras, particularly digital SLR,
will have a fully manual white balance option.
| | 02:33 | Now the way this is going to work is
I have here a white piece of paper.
| | 02:37 | I am going to give this to her.
| | 02:38 | She is going to hold it up.
| | 02:41 | Now I am getting it to her because I
need this white piece of paper in the light
| | 02:45 | where I am shooting.
| | 02:47 | If I was to simply hold it out here,
| | 02:49 | this is no good because this is all lit up.
| | 02:51 | That's not where she is standing.
| | 02:52 | So I am going to give this her and ask her to
hold it, and I am going to take a shot of it.
| | 02:56 | It doesn't tell matter
what my camera settings are.
| | 02:58 | I am going ahead and just stick it
back on white balance for a minute.
| | 03:01 | I am going to zoom in, and I am going to
take a shot, and this is all it is.
| | 03:05 | It's a shot of a white piece of paper.
| | 03:07 | One thing to note is if you fill the
entire frame with the white piece of paper,
| | 03:10 | you may trip up your
camera's auto focus mechanism.
| | 03:12 | So I leave a little bit of an
edge, so I can focus on that.
| | 03:15 | Take a shot of the white piece of paper.
| | 03:17 | Now I am just going to take this out of
her hand because we are done with that.
| | 03:21 | Thank you very much.
| | 03:23 | What I do now--and this is going to
vary from camera to camera--on this
| | 03:26 | particular camera, what I do is I go
into the menu, and I tell it this picture
| | 03:30 | that I took is the source
for my white balance setting.
| | 03:33 | It's going to analyze that and say okay.
| | 03:36 | Now on the top of the camera, I dial
in manual white balance, and I am ready
| | 03:41 | to take another shot. So let's do that.
| | 03:45 | Here is the result.
| | 03:46 | It's not dramatically different from cloudy
white balance, but it is little bit better.
| | 03:49 | It's a little less saturated.
| | 03:51 | So in most cases, if you can manage to
pull off a manual white that's the way to go--
| | 03:56 | a fully manual white balance of
getting a white object out there and focusing
| | 03:59 | your white balance mechanism on it.
It's going to particularly be good in shady
| | 04:03 | situations like this. Mixed lighting
situations, say you have got sun light
| | 04:08 | streaming into a
fluorescently lit office somewhere--
| | 04:10 | that can really confuse in auto mechanism.
| | 04:13 | There will be other times where it's
just not possible to get a white object out
| | 04:17 | there into your scene, because maybe
you are shooting a landscape, or it's too
| | 04:19 | far away, or something like that,
and for those time there is another option.
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| Shooting raw | 00:00 | Let's be honest, bad white
balance can really ruin your whole day.
| | 00:04 | Worse, it can ruin an entire shoot.
| | 00:06 | If your white balance is off,
the color in your image can be
| | 00:09 | irreversibly ruined.
| | 00:11 | Take look at this image. The color is
not terrible, but the auto white balance
| | 00:15 | mechanism on my camera failed me here.
| | 00:16 | I was shooting in shade, and it's
just not very good shade, and things have
| | 00:20 | ended up a little cool.
| | 00:21 | She doesn't have a skin tone that's as
warm and healthy looking as it should be.
| | 00:25 | Now a lot of people hear me
grousing about white balance and they say,
| | 00:28 | "Well, that's who cares.
| | 00:29 | I can just correct it in Photoshop."
| | 00:30 | The thing about bad white balance
though is that it can be really difficult
| | 00:34 | thing to fix because it can affect
different parts of your image in different ways.
| | 00:38 | Shadow areas might have a
different color shift than highlight areas.
| | 00:41 | It's also important to understand that
every image has a finite amount of editability.
| | 00:46 | That is, you can only edit so far before you
begin to see visible artifacts in your image.
| | 00:51 | So you don't want to use up a lot of
the editability of your image with white
| | 00:55 | balance correction, because then you
won't be able to perform many other edits
| | 00:59 | without running into visible artifacts.
| | 01:01 | This is one of the great advantages of RAW.
| | 01:03 | This is a RAW file.
| | 01:04 | I am going to open it up now in my RAW
editor, which in this case is Photoshop
| | 01:08 | Camera RAW running inside of Photoshop CS5.
| | 01:11 | There are a lot of reasons to shoot RAW.
| | 01:14 | This isn't RAW course.
| | 01:15 | We are not going to go into them.
| | 01:16 | We are not going to go into RAW editing,
but I just wanted to show you white
| | 01:19 | balance, because one of the great things
about shooting RAW is that I can change
| | 01:22 | my white balance after the fact.
| | 01:24 | I have got these two white
balance controls over here.
| | 01:26 | If I just start dragging
temperature to the right, look at there:
| | 01:29 | my image gets warmer. And now I have got
a skin tone that's much healthier looking.
| | 01:34 | The great thing about making this
correction in here is it's essentially a free edit.
| | 01:39 | I am not using up any of
the editability in my image.
| | 01:42 | I can drag this as far as I want.
| | 01:44 | I will never see posterization.
| | 01:46 | I will never see tone breaks.
And performing a dramatic editing here is not
| | 01:50 | going to make me more liable to see
posterizing and tone breaks later.
| | 01:54 | So this, again, this a
great reason to shoot RAW.
| | 01:57 | I am going to undo that change.
| | 01:59 | I am just going to cancel out
of here and reopen the image.
| | 02:02 | Most RAW converters include
another way of setting white balance.
| | 02:05 | Sometimes it can be difficult to eyeball
what is the correct white balance, but
| | 02:09 | here in Camera RAW, I've got this
cool White Balance tool up here.
| | 02:12 | You see it's a little eye dropper.
| | 02:14 | If I click it on something in the image
that is supposed to be gray, and we've
| | 02:18 | got this tree bark back here that has
a lot of gray tones in them, and I am
| | 02:21 | looking for kind of a middle gray.
| | 02:22 | If I click in there, boom!
| | 02:24 | It automatically samples that
color and does an adjustment.
| | 02:27 | My image got a little warmer there.
| | 02:28 | Let's try a different shade.
| | 02:29 | Now that's not warming it up as much as
I like, but it's giving nice ballpark,
| | 02:33 | and from there I can grab my
Temperature slider, and go a little warmer.
| | 02:38 | Let's take a look at some other images.
| | 02:40 | I have got here two pictures
that I shot in the same place.
| | 02:44 | I am going to open them both up in Camera RAW.
| | 02:46 | I can see them both here.
| | 02:48 | Again, white balance didn't do great.
| | 02:49 | This is auto white balance inside a
kind of shady room. But in this case, in
| | 02:54 | this image, the model happens to be
holding this little gray card right here,
| | 02:58 | and it's actually a
white balance reference card.
| | 03:00 | You see WhiBal on it.
| | 03:01 | This is a WhiBal card. Whibal.com.
| | 03:04 | This is the best 20 bucks you will spend
for something to put in your camera bag.
| | 03:09 | What this gives me is something
that I know is supposed to be gray.
| | 03:12 | So now if I get my white balance
dropper and click it on here, boom!
| | 03:16 | There is correct white balance.
| | 03:17 | That's all I have to do.
| | 03:19 | Now how does that help me with--
obviously this is not the image that I want to
| | 03:22 | deliver because she is holding this
little card in front of her--how does it
| | 03:25 | help me with this image over here?
| | 03:26 | Well, there are two ways I can go about this--
| | 03:29 | actually, there are a lot of ways. But I
can simply look up the Temperature and
| | 03:32 | Tint values here, and go and enter them
here manually. Or in Camera RAW, I can
| | 03:38 | select both images and synchronize them.
| | 03:42 | Now, with them synchronized, when I do
my white balance correction here on this
| | 03:47 | image, it's automatically
applied to this image over here.
| | 03:50 | So a single-click, and I have got
correct white balance in this image.
| | 03:55 | Again, there are lot of good
reasons to be shooting RAW.
| | 03:58 | White balance is pretty killer one
though, for those times when your auto white
| | 04:03 | balance mechanism lets you down or
maybe you forget to change out of tungsten
| | 04:06 | mode before you go outside, or your
camera stuck in fluorescent white balance
| | 04:10 | mode, and you didn't realize it.
| | 04:11 | You get home with RAW images,
| | 04:13 | all of those problems are
very, very easily correctable.
| | 04:16 | If you get home with JPEG images, those
problems may not be correctable at all,
| | 04:20 | and even if they are, it's
going to be very, very tricky edit.
| | 04:24 | So it's worth your time to look into
RAW and learn a little more about it.
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|
|
8. Metering ModesHow light meters work| 00:01 | Here is a weird one.
| | 00:02 | Look at this black-and-white checkerboard.
| | 00:04 | We have got equal numbers of black-and-white
squares, and all of the squares are the same size.
| | 00:09 | Obviously, white squares
reflect light, and black square don't.
| | 00:12 | So you might think that this grid,
which is half-composed of reflective white
| | 00:16 | squares, would reflect half of the
light that's strikes it. But it doesn't.
| | 00:20 | It only reflects 18% of
the light that strikes it.
| | 00:24 | Here is weirder one.
| | 00:26 | This is true for most scenes in the world.
| | 00:28 | It turns out that most scenes that you look
at reflect 18% of the light that strikes them.
| | 00:33 | Now this fact has obvious
applications for cocktail party conversation,
| | 00:38 | crossword puzzles, and making very
nerdy impressions on first dates, but there
| | 00:42 | is a photographic application as well:
because most scenes in the world reflect
| | 00:47 | 18% of the light that strikes them,
| | 00:49 | if your light meter assumes that what
it's pointed at is reflecting 18%, then
| | 00:54 | that's a pretty safe assumption.
| | 00:55 | So what your light meter actually
calculates is a shutter speed and aperture
| | 01:00 | that will accurately reproduce the
tones and colors of something that is
| | 01:04 | reflecting 18% of the light that strikes it.
| | 01:07 | Again, for most scenes in the
world, this is a safe assumption.
| | 01:10 | Remember, different amounts of light
will need different exposure settings, but
| | 01:14 | your light meter assumption is always
that you want exposure settings that are
| | 01:18 | correct for 18% reflectance.
| | 01:21 | Now as you'll see later, this assumption
can occasionally let you down, but most
| | 01:24 | of the time it will be fine.
| | 01:26 | To further assist you, your meter tries
to choose a shutter speed that will be
| | 01:29 | safer hand-held shooting, though if
the light is too low this may not be
| | 01:32 | possible, and it tries to
pick a midrange aperture.
| | 01:36 | Most of the time you can just let your
light meter do its, but as you see later,
| | 01:39 | there will be time when you need to out-
think it and takes a manual overrides to
| | 01:43 | ensure that some tones and
colors appear correct in your image.
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| Why are there different modes? | 00:00 | Autofocus, auto white balance, a
low-light and dynamic range capability that
| | 00:06 | puts film to shame: the modern digital
camera is filled with really cutting-edge
| | 00:10 | amazing technology, and one of the most
impressive is the camera's light meter.
| | 00:14 | Light metering technology has come a
long way in the last 20 years, and the
| | 00:18 | metering modes in different cameras
are really very often the selling points
| | 00:22 | of certain cameras.
| | 00:23 | What you may have noticed already
is that your camera offers different
| | 00:26 | light metering modes.
| | 00:27 | In some cases, it might have up
to four different light meters.
| | 00:30 | We're going to look at what those are for.
| | 00:32 | By default, we've been encouraging you
to stay in your cameras matrix metering
| | 00:35 | mode, which is sometimes
called an evaluative metering mode.
| | 00:39 | The way matrix metering works is when I
point my camera at a scene, the frame is
| | 00:43 | divided into a grid and each cell in
the grid is metered, and then the camera
| | 00:48 | uses all sorts of snarly, algorithmic
processes to kind of average all those out
| | 00:53 | into a good assessment of what
the correct exposure should be.
| | 00:57 | Most of the time that works, and most of
the time matrix or evaluative metering
| | 01:01 | is all you need to use.
| | 01:02 | You can put your camera in that mode--
it's probably its default mode--and you can
| | 01:04 | just leave it there.
But then there are times like this.
| | 01:07 | So Ben is standing in front of what's
going to be a really nice sunset up here,
| | 01:10 | but it means he is very, very backlit.
| | 01:13 | When I point my matrix meter and frame
him up, the bright sky in the background
| | 01:18 | is confusing the meter.
| | 01:19 | It's basically throwing the average off.
| | 01:21 | There are so many bright cells in the
grid as compared to his face that when I
| | 01:25 | take the shot, I get an image where
his face has been plunged into darkness.
| | 01:29 | The camera is in one way doing a good thing.
| | 01:32 | It's exposing to be sure that I
don't lose all the detail in the sky.
| | 01:35 | Unfortunately, in the process of
doing, that it's underexposing him, and he
| | 01:38 | is ending up all dark.
| | 01:40 | There is something I can do about that though.
| | 01:41 | I can change my metering mode.
| | 01:43 | If I switch to a center-weight metering,
what's going to happen now is when I
| | 01:47 | frame the shot it's going to continue
to divide the frame into a grid of cells,
| | 01:53 | and it's going to meter them all and
average them, but it's going to give extra
| | 01:56 | statistical weight to a
circle of cells in the center.
| | 02:00 | When I take that shot I get
this, and this is much better.
| | 02:04 | Now, I've lost the background;
| | 02:05 | it's gone. But look at his face.
| | 02:07 | I can actually see detail there.
| | 02:09 | Now you might go, "But I wanted the background."
| | 02:11 | You're just not going to get it.
| | 02:13 | One thing is as amazing as modern camera
technology is, as we've discussed, what I
| | 02:17 | can't have is full
dynamic range in this situation.
| | 02:20 | Yes, with my eye I can see detail on his face,
and I can see bright detail on the background.
| | 02:23 | There is no photographic technology
yet that's good enough to do that.
| | 02:27 | So I am willing to sacrifice the
background here to get detail on his face.
| | 02:31 | Let's look another metering mode.
| | 02:33 | I can switch over to spot metering,
which does kind of like center-weight does,
| | 02:37 | except instead of averaging, all it does
it meter a very small spot in the center
| | 02:42 | of the frame, and that's it.
| | 02:44 | It doesn't pay attention to
anything else in the frame.
| | 02:46 | So I am going to put the spot right on his nose.
| | 02:48 | Actually, I am going to put it on his
eye to be sure that I'm focused on his eye.
| | 02:52 | Take my shot.
| | 02:54 | For the most part this doesn't look
that much different than center-weight,
| | 02:57 | because I think in this case the
center part that it was averaging is pretty
| | 03:01 | much the exact size of his head in the frame.
| | 03:03 | So I am getting go to exposure either way.
| | 03:05 | What's spot metering can be good for as
in a high-dynamic-range scene like this,
| | 03:08 | if there is something in the
frame--it may not be in the center--
| | 03:11 | if there is something in the frame
that you absolutely want to insure that
| | 03:15 | you get good detail on, put your spot
meter on that, meter off of that, and
| | 03:19 | then take your shot.
| | 03:20 | You've got to be careful when you're
doing that though, because if what I am
| | 03:22 | metering on is way, way, way in the distance,
remember I am on autofocus there, and
| | 03:26 | then when I reframe, he might be out of focus.
| | 03:29 | So what I would want to do is meter on
that bit and then use my exposure lock button.
| | 03:35 | Most cameras have a button that you can
press that will lock those exposure settings.
| | 03:38 | Then I can reframe my shot, focus,
| | 03:41 | I'll still have those other
exposure settings, and I can take my shot.
| | 03:44 | So using exposure lock in combination
with spot meter is very often essential.
| | 03:48 | As with so many settings on your camera,
after you've used a specialized setting
| | 03:52 | like a spot meter, I want
to be sure to change it back.
| | 03:54 | I don't want to keep spot metering as I
move back into kind of my more normal shooting.
| | 03:58 | So I am putting it back on matrix mode.
| | 04:00 | Again, most of the time matrix mode is
all you're going to need, but anytime
| | 04:04 | you're on a backlight situation,
someone standing in front of a window--
| | 04:07 | anything that's really bright in the
background, it doesn't necessarily have
| | 04:09 | to be bright light;
| | 04:10 | it could just be something white,
sometimes that will throw off a meter--
| | 04:13 | then you want to look at some of
these additional metering modes.
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|
|
9. Exposure CompensationExposure compensation| 00:00 | Let's recap a few things here.
| | 00:02 | We've been covering a lot of different modes.
| | 00:03 | Program mode where the camera
automatically picks a shutter speed and aperture
| | 00:07 | for you, that will give you a
good overall level of illumination.
| | 00:11 | We've also looked at priority modes:
| | 00:13 | shutter priority where you get to pick
a shutter speed and the camera picks a
| | 00:17 | corresponding aperture that will yield
a good level of overall illumination;
| | 00:21 | aperture priority mode where you get do
pick an aperture, and the camera picks
| | 00:25 | a corresponding shutter speed that will
yield a good level of overall illumination.
| | 00:28 | Are you sensing a pattern here?
| | 00:30 | I keep saying that one phrase over and
over over: "a good level of illumination."
| | 00:35 | With all of the controls we've been
looking at so far, the camera will always
| | 00:39 | try to get you the same level of brightness.
| | 00:41 | I'm going to switch to aperture
priority mode here real quick.
| | 00:45 | I am metering, and I have
dialed in an aperture of f11.
| | 00:50 | If I change that aperture--I'm
going to go down to f 5.6 here--
| | 00:57 | as I change that, the overall
brightness in the scene has not changed.
| | 01:00 | The camera is constantly picking a
corresponding shutter speed that will
| | 01:04 | preserve my overall light level.
| | 01:07 | In this way, the camera is protecting
me from ever over- or underexposing.
| | 01:12 | Now, believe it or not, as much as
we've been talking about how you need to be
| | 01:15 | careful about not overexposing your
highlights, and that kind of thing, believe
| | 01:18 | it or not, there are times when
you want to over- and underexpose.
| | 01:22 | We're going to spend the rest of this
chapter talking about when those times are.
| | 01:26 | Sometimes you will do it to ensure
that black-and-white tones look correct.
| | 01:29 | Sometimes you'll do it to improve color.
| | 01:31 | There are lot of reasons why you
might want to over- or underexpose.
| | 01:35 | The key to making that happen is your
camera's exposure compensation control.
| | 01:40 | Now, most cameras use the same kind
of readout for exposure compensation:
| | 01:44 | this type of dial right down here.
| | 01:46 | In the middle is just a flat exposure,
what my camera has decided is correct.
| | 01:52 | And here I've got a little Plus
sign and here I've got a Minus sign.
| | 01:56 | On this particular camera, there is
just a wheel on the back that I turn.
| | 01:59 | For exposure compensation to
work, you first have to meter.
| | 02:02 | So I'm going to half-press to
meter, and I let it focus.
| | 02:06 | I'm going to lock my camera now.
| | 02:08 | I'm going to switch my focus
on my lens over to manual focus.
| | 02:11 | Now, that it's focused, I don't
ever need to re-autofocus on that.
| | 02:14 | So that will stay there while
we do the rest of this work.
| | 02:17 | Anyway, I half-pressed the meter, and now
if I dial in a one stop overexposure, this
| | 02:23 | little thing moves over
here to 1--this is the Plus side.
| | 02:27 | So I am seeing one stop of overexposure.
| | 02:30 | The image is much brighter now.
| | 02:31 | Let's go back, and you can see that again.
| | 02:33 | Here is how the camera wants to meter.
| | 02:37 | Here is one stop overexposed.
| | 02:38 | So it's brighter now.
| | 02:39 | I have actually managed to overexpose this shot.
| | 02:41 | Let's go the other direction.
| | 02:42 | I am going to go one stop under.
| | 02:45 | My image is getting darker.
| | 02:46 | Here is one and a third stop.
| | 02:48 | That's what this first little tick mark is.
| | 02:50 | Here is one and two-thirds
stop. Here is two stops under.
| | 02:53 | So my image is getting progressively darker.
| | 02:56 | So this is a very easy way to
make an under- or overexposure.
| | 03:00 | We'll talk about what those are for later.
| | 03:01 | I just want to go over the control right now.
| | 03:04 | Notice that as I am moving this dial around,
the only thing that's changing is shutter speed.
| | 03:09 | That's because I am in aperture priority mode.
| | 03:12 | When you're in a priority mode,
that parameter takes priority.
| | 03:17 | I am in aperture priority mode,
and I've dialed in 5.6, which means the camera
| | 03:21 | will not change that.
| | 03:22 | If I tell it to underexpose, the only way
I can do that is by changing shutter speed.
| | 03:26 | Let's go in the other direction.
| | 03:28 | I'm going to switch to shutter speed and
dial in a shutter speed of say a 60th of a second.
| | 03:34 | As I meter, it comes out at f 5.
| | 03:35 | If I tell it to overexpose, that means
it's going to want to open up the aperture.
| | 03:40 | So as I go here, my number
should go down, which it did.
| | 03:43 | It went down to f 4.
| | 03:44 | If I go to underexpose, my aperture
should get smaller, because it can't change
| | 03:50 | shutter speed, because I am in shutter
priority mode, and then we're at 7.1.
| | 03:53 | So this is exposure compensation.
| | 03:56 | In the next few lessons, we're
going to take a look at what it's for.
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| Intentional overexposure| 00:00 | This is Jack. His ear is in my mouth.
| | 00:04 | I don't know how much you can see me,
because right now what's going on is the
| | 00:07 | bright sky behind me is
causing the camera to underexpose me.
| | 00:12 | So this is a case where if you were
shooting in this situation, you wouldn't
| | 00:15 | have any detail on me because of
the bright background behind me.
| | 00:19 | So we're going to show you a kind of a
simulation of what you want to do with your camera.
| | 00:23 | If we overexpose intentionally, you
can now see detail on me and Jack.
| | 00:29 | Jack's getting a little impatient.
| | 00:31 | You can see now see detail on me and Jack.
| | 00:32 | Now the background is blown
completely out to white, and that's just
| | 00:35 | something you have to accept.
| | 00:36 | It's a stylistic choice you can make.
| | 00:38 | If there is no detail there
that we need, that can be fine.
| | 00:41 | Now the way you would do this on
your camera is to dial in an intentional
| | 00:44 | overexposure using your
exposure compensation control.
| | 00:47 | How much is something you may just have to
experience in that with: one stop, two stop.
| | 00:51 | That's one of the great things about being
able to review your images on your camera.
| | 00:55 | So, let's take a look again.
| | 00:56 | Here is what your camera will
probably do by default when you meter in a
| | 00:59 | situation like this.
| | 01:01 | So no detail on me, no detail on Jack here.
| | 01:05 | Here is what happens if you
intentionally overexpose using your exposure
| | 01:09 | compensation control.
| | 01:11 | Now, let's take a look at the shots.
| | 01:13 | So here are the two shots I came with.
| | 01:14 | The first one is the shot as my camera
wanted to meter it, and you can see that
| | 01:19 | the camera really biased
itself for the background,
| | 01:21 | this bright highlight,
and that's left Jack in shadow.
| | 01:24 | So that was no good.
| | 01:25 | So what I wanted to do, of course,
was intentionally overexpose using my
| | 01:29 | exposure compensation dial.
| | 01:31 | So I dialed in a one-stop
overexposure and got this shot.
| | 01:35 | Now, the problem was I was
worried about Jack running away.
| | 01:38 | So I didn't actually do what I've
been bugging you to do which is to always
| | 01:42 | check shutter speed when you shoot.
| | 01:44 | I took the shot and had not
checked in on my shutter speed.
| | 01:47 | I didn't know that it was actually at
a 1/20 of a second, which is too slow
| | 01:50 | for hand-held shooting.
| | 01:52 | However, when I pressed the shutter
button I heard a distinct "kathunk" of a slow
| | 01:56 | shutter speed, and right away I realized, oh,
my shutter speed is too slow. Jack is moving.
| | 02:00 | I am moving.
| | 02:01 | This is going to be a blurry shot.
| | 02:03 | So very quickly, I dialed my ISO up to 400.
| | 02:07 | I looked at my shutter speed,
saw that it was at a 20th.
| | 02:08 | I knew that if I went up two stops, that
would get me from a 20th to a 40th to an 80th.
| | 02:13 | That's fine for hand-held shooting.
| | 02:15 | I quickly changed my ISO and took a second
shot, and that got me something usable.
| | 02:20 | This is a fine example of why you really
need to be familiar with your camera controls.
| | 02:23 | You've got to sometimes make
those adjustments very, very quickly.
| | 02:26 | This is also a great example of
combining a number of the different
| | 02:29 | concepts we've talked about:
| | 02:30 | how you can buy yourself more shutter
speed latitude with an ISO change, and
| | 02:35 | more importantly, that you can
intentionally overexpose to put detail back
| | 02:39 | into shadows.
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| Intentional underexposure| 00:00 | This is Ursula.
| | 00:01 | Ursula has figured out that I have
peanut-butter-filled pretzels in my pocket,
| | 00:06 | and apparently, I'm not
giving her enough of them.
| | 00:09 | Ursula is an interesting exposure
challenge, not just because she is chewing on
| | 00:13 | my fingers and trying to get pretzels
out of my pocket, but because her face has
| | 00:17 | black on it, and white.
| | 00:19 | If I try to take a shot of her, my
camera is going to be thrown off by the black.
| | 00:23 | It's going to overexpose, and I'm
going to lose detail on the white.
| | 00:26 | So I'm going to just kind of get her
busy chewing, and take a quick shot.
| | 00:31 | If you look here in bright sunlight, you see
that this bit right here is all overexposed.
| | 00:42 | All the stuff on her nose is overexposed.
| | 00:44 | So what I'm going to do is
an intentional underexposure.
| | 00:48 | Now we talked about how when you
meter, your camera tries to find a
| | 00:51 | shutter speed and aperture
combination that yield a good exposure, which
| | 00:54 | means good overall brightness.
| | 00:56 | Well, in this case, again, it's being
thrown by the black bits, and we're
| | 00:59 | losing the white bits.
| | 01:00 | So using my exposure compensation control,
I'm going to dial in one stop of underexposure.
| | 01:05 | I'm going to take another shot or two.
| | 01:07 | Ursula is getting really bored.
| | 01:10 | Now if you look at these, you'll see
that we've got detail back on her nose.
| | 01:14 | All the white stuff is back.
| | 01:16 | The black has gone blacker.
| | 01:18 | I can either try and bring that up in my
image editor or actually it looks okay,
| | 01:21 | because she is pretty dark.
| | 01:22 | So overall, I'm getting a better exposure.
| | 01:24 | So there are times when you have to
out-think your meter, where what it's
| | 01:28 | delivering is not good for the
exposure situation you're in.
| | 01:32 | You have to either intentionally under- or
overexpose to put tone back where it needs to be.
| | 01:37 | Ursula is leaving, so that's
it for this particular lesson.
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| Controlling tone | 00:00 | Okay, I am here now with Cowgirl and
Cowgirl's personal masseuse, who is going to
| | 00:06 | make sure that she stays here
| | 00:07 | while I demonstrate the problem of
shooting something or someone who is a
| | 00:11 | really, really dark-black color.
| | 00:13 | Now you've learned that when you meter,
your camera, your light meter, assumes
| | 00:19 | that what you're pointed
at is a middle-gray tone.
| | 00:21 | Now, Cowgirl here is anything but middle-gray.
| | 00:24 | So when I shoot, what's going to happen
is the camera is going to calculate an
| | 00:28 | exposure that will render her more
gray rather than black, and I want this
| | 00:32 | beautiful inky black that she is.
| | 00:34 | So to restore the tone in her in the
image to where it needs to be, I need to
| | 00:39 | intentionally underexpose, because when
I underexpose, it won't gather as much
| | 00:43 | light, and she will be left a little darker.
| | 00:45 | So I am going to take two shots of her,
just as we did with Jack and Ursula, and
| | 00:50 | we can see the difference.
| | 00:54 | So here's one as the camera meters, and
here's another one underexposed by a stop,
| | 01:01 | and here's one underexposed by two stops,
because I am not sure where I actually
| | 01:05 | need to be to get the tone back to where it was.
| | 01:09 | So, let's take a look at these.
| | 01:10 | Here's the shot as it was metered.
| | 01:13 | You can see, at first, you may
look at and go, "Oh! I don't know.
| | 01:15 | That looks like a black cow to me."
| | 01:17 | But remember, your eye is
constantly correcting tone.
| | 01:19 | Now, take a closer look and realize she
is not really black; she is a dark gray.
| | 01:24 | We want her nice deep inky black.
| | 01:26 | So here's our underexposed image.
| | 01:28 | This one is underexposed by
one stop, and that's much better.
| | 01:31 | You can see that she has been
restored to a complete black.
| | 01:34 | Now this is a little bit
different than what we did with Ursula.
| | 01:36 | With Ursula, we underexposed her to
be sure that we were preserving the
| | 01:41 | highlight details in the
white part of her snout.
| | 01:43 | Now, Ursula is not actually black.
| | 01:45 | She is a darkish, brownish,
reddish kind of color.
| | 01:48 | So when we underexposed her, she
actually went a little too dark,
| | 01:51 | so we had to bring her back up.
| | 01:53 | But in the case of shooting something
black, very often you need to underexpose
| | 01:57 | to get tone back to where it used to be.
| | 01:59 | In the old days, if you were shooting
something white, you needed to overexpose
| | 02:03 | to restore those tones to white.
| | 02:06 | If you ever shot with an older camera
and tried to shoot snow, or a really white
| | 02:10 | sandy beach, you might come back
and think it all look a little dingy.
| | 02:13 | Light meters today
typically don't have that problem.
| | 02:15 | They are usually very good at
getting white correct. But if you do shoot
| | 02:19 | something white and find that it
looks a little dingy, try overexposing.
| | 02:23 | These are intentional over- and underexposures
used to restore tone, and exposure compensation is the
| | 02:29 | easiest way to go about doing this.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The histogram| 00:00 | Now that you are intentionally over- and
underexposing, you have a great level of
| | 00:04 | control over a number of things, from
tonality, to ensuring that highlights and
| | 00:08 | shadows hold the details that you want.
| | 00:10 | But here's the bad news:
| | 00:12 | while it's great that you have the
little screen on the back of your camera for
| | 00:15 | reviewing your images, it's important to
understand that the screen is only good
| | 00:19 | for judging composition. Really, it
tells you nothing at all about color or
| | 00:23 | exposure, because the image on the
screen is brightened and saturated by the
| | 00:26 | camera to make it easier
to view in bright light.
| | 00:29 | So just because an image looks okay
on the camera screen doesn't mean that
| | 00:34 | you've actually got a good exposure.
| | 00:35 | Now, in the old days when facing a
difficult exposure situation, photographers
| | 00:39 | had to bracket their shots.
| | 00:40 | They had to shoot the same image with
multiple exposures, and there's still a
| | 00:44 | lot of times when that's a
good tool for a digital shooter.
| | 00:46 | But fortunately, as a digital
photographer, you have an additional tool in the
| | 00:50 | form of the histogram.
| | 00:52 | So I have got a histogram right here,
and it's going to look a little math-like,
| | 00:55 | but don't worry about that.
| | 00:56 | It's actually very simple.
| | 00:58 | What I've got here is just a graph.
| | 00:59 | This is an image of a grayscale going
from black to white, and what I have here
| | 01:04 | is a histogram generated by this image.
| | 01:06 | A histogram is just a bar chart
representing the distribution of tones in an
| | 01:12 | image with black on the
left and white on the right.
| | 01:16 | So my gray ramp goes from black to white
with a bunch of intermediate shades of gray.
| | 01:20 | My histogram is showing a whole lot of
black and a whole lot of white and a
| | 01:24 | full range of intermediate tones.
| | 01:26 | So if I think about, over there I have
got 100% black and for every 100% black
| | 01:31 | pixel, another little dot is added to
the 100% black bar, and so on and so forth.
| | 01:36 | Each line, each tiny little line
just represents one bar in this chart.
| | 01:40 | It's somewhat easy to understand a
histogram when we are looking at a very
| | 01:44 | simple thing like a grayscale ramp.
| | 01:47 | So let's look at more of a real-world situation.
| | 01:50 | What we've got here is a simple set.
| | 01:52 | We've got a darker gray backdrop
with a table in front, with a lighter
| | 01:56 | gray tablecloth on it.
| | 01:58 | This is what it looks like in my camera.
| | 02:00 | Now you should recognize this.
| | 02:02 | This particular camera has the ability
to generate a live histogram on the fly
| | 02:06 | while I am shooting.
| | 02:07 | So what I am seeing here is a
camera-generated histogram of my scene.
| | 02:11 | I've got black over here, white
over here, and here's some data.
| | 02:15 | Now, I have nothing,
| | 02:17 | I have no black in the image.
| | 02:18 | I have no really dark gray in the image.
| | 02:20 | I know that because there is
no data here. There are no bars.
| | 02:23 | I have no white in the image.
| | 02:25 | I have no really bright tones.
| | 02:26 | I know that because there is no data in
this part of the image, there are no bars.
| | 02:29 | What I have is this big mess here.
| | 02:32 | I have got a big blob of data here,
and that's going to be all of this dark
| | 02:37 | gray that's back here.
| | 02:38 | I have got a smaller blob of data here.
| | 02:41 | That's going to be all of this
light gray on the tablecloth.
| | 02:44 | I've got some intermediate gray tones.
| | 02:46 | Those are the little shadows and
folds and all of that kind of thing.
| | 02:49 | So I can see that I have no
black in the image. I have no white.
| | 02:52 | I've just got couple of pieces of gray.
| | 02:54 | Now, let's watch what happens as
Samara brings in our black antique film
| | 02:59 | projector and puts it in the scene.
| | 03:01 | Now, as you'll recall, there was--I am
waiting for her to get out of the frame
| | 03:05 | because she was in the frame,
| | 03:06 | so she was becoming part of the histogram.
| | 03:09 | As you'll recall, there was no
data over here, and now there is.
| | 03:13 | Here's all the data that
represents these tones in the image.
| | 03:17 | So there's some black right here.
| | 03:18 | So the histogram generation
software says, "Well, there's some black.
| | 03:22 | That means I've got to put a little bar
right there, and here's some lighter black.
| | 03:24 | I've got to put some right there."
| | 03:25 | So we've filled in this part of
the graph with some of that data.
| | 03:28 | Now, you may have noticed also that
there is a little bit less gray data
| | 03:32 | than there was before.
| | 03:33 | That's because the projector here has
replaced these gray pixels that were there before,
| | 03:38 | so they've dropped out of the graph
and been replaced with these new pixels.
| | 03:41 | Now, take a look over here on the right.
| | 03:43 | We have no light data, no
white, nothing really bright.
| | 03:46 | Watch what happens as, once again, she
brings in a white orchid and places it in
| | 03:51 | the frame, and we wait for her
pixels to be taken out of the graph.
| | 03:57 | It settles down a little bit, and look
at here. Sure enough, well, I'll move
| | 04:00 | the camera around some,
| | 04:01 | we've got white data in our
image now. Not completely white.
| | 04:05 | We've got a bunch of white data over here.
| | 04:07 | This is because these tones get
placed in the histogram right here.
| | 04:12 | Something that is very important to
understand about the histogram is the
| | 04:15 | shape doesn't matter.
| | 04:17 | There's no correct shape for an image.
| | 04:19 | Some people think, "Oh!
| | 04:20 | I am supposed to aim for a
histogram that looks like a bell curve or a
| | 04:23 | hippopotamus or something like that."
| | 04:25 | It's not like that.
| | 04:26 | You are not trying to control the histogram.
| | 04:28 | The histogram is simply
telling you what's in your image.
| | 04:31 | Now, you've learned, using your
exposure compensation control, how to control
| | 04:36 | tone in your image, how to underexpose and
overexpose to properly represent black or white.
| | 04:41 | Let's do that here.
| | 04:43 | I have nothing in my image
that is actually real black.
| | 04:47 | I can tell that because there's no real
dark black over here, and all of these
| | 04:49 | tones in this nice, dark-black film
projector are coming out kind of gray.
| | 04:53 | So I am going to meter my scene here.
| | 04:55 | I am going to
intentionally underexpose my image.
| | 05:00 | And look what's happened.
| | 05:01 | I've got more black down here.
| | 05:03 | These black tones have piled up a little higher.
| | 05:06 | But also watch what
happened to the rest of the tones.
| | 05:09 | Everything in the histogram shifted to the left.
| | 05:11 | In other words, all the tones are darker.
| | 05:13 | Even my lighter tones, the ones that
were up here, have shifted down here.
| | 05:17 | Everything in the image is darker,
| | 05:19 | so my tones are shifted much more to the left.
| | 05:22 | Now, let's do the opposite.
Let's overexpose the image to brighten it up.
| | 05:25 | Maybe I originally metered it, and it
looked like this, and I think, I don't
| | 05:28 | know, these nice white flowers,
| | 05:29 | they should be a little whiter.
| | 05:31 | So I am going to overexpose, and sure
enough, everything in the image has
| | 05:36 | moved to the right.
| | 05:37 | That means that these tones are
no longer as dark as they were, and
| | 05:40 | that's reflected here.
| | 05:41 | My white tones are much brighter. But look at
this, these have blown out to complete white.
| | 05:46 | That's showing up over here in the
histogram as the spike on the right side.
| | 05:49 | You don't want this.
| | 05:50 | Anytime you see a spike on the right side of
your histogram, it means you've got overexposure.
| | 05:54 | It means you have lost detail, things
have gone out to complete white, and
| | 05:57 | that's what I am seeing here.
| | 05:59 | The opposite is true also.
| | 06:01 | That's going to be a
little bit harder for us to get.
| | 06:02 | I can underexpose too much and end up
with a spike of complete black, meaning
| | 06:07 | detail lost into shadows.
| | 06:09 | So you may look at this and say,
"You needed a graph to figure out that this
| | 06:13 | image was overexposed?
| | 06:14 | You can tell just by looking at it
that it's too bright," and that's true.
| | 06:17 | But remember, you can't tell
that by looking at your LCD screen.
| | 06:20 | It's never going to be
accurate in terms of exposure.
| | 06:23 | Histogram gives me a quick way to
immediately see that I have got this spike
| | 06:27 | over here on the right.
| | 06:28 | Now, color has a tone as well, and that
can be a little bit harder to understand.
| | 06:33 | So we are going to take this set out of
here and start over with some color objects.
| | 06:39 | All of our histogram examples so far
have been grayscale or predominantly
| | 06:43 | black-and-white examples, and of
course, the real world is colored.
| | 06:46 | So how does color show up in the histogram?
| | 06:48 | Color has a tone, a gray value,
just like any black or white object.
| | 06:54 | I think this will become more
obvious as we build a new scene here.
| | 06:58 | We've got an empty vase on our table.
| | 07:00 | You can't really see the table.
| | 07:01 | I've cropped it out of the shot.
And now Samara's going to bring in
| | 07:05 | some lovely yellow flowers and place them in
the histogram, and place them in the histogram.
| | 07:10 | This is how I think now.
| | 07:11 | Everything in the world
is in terms of histograms.
| | 07:13 | She places them in the shot, and
before we had just the gray blob over here
| | 07:18 | representing the background, and now
we've got a whole bunch of detail up here
| | 07:22 | representing these yellow flowers.
| | 07:23 | Why do they come in here?
| | 07:25 | Because they are very bright.
They are very bright yellow.
| | 07:27 | That's a little out of focus.
| | 07:29 | Let's just fix that up.
| | 07:31 | So if I think of these in terms of a
corresponding shade of gray, they are very
| | 07:35 | light gray, and so they end up
here in this part of the histogram.
| | 07:39 | Let's bring in some darker flowers now.
| | 07:41 | She is going to put those in the shot.
| | 07:47 | When she does that, she fills in a lot of
the black tones down here, or darker gray tones.
| | 07:52 | These red flowers are much
darker than these yellow flowers.
| | 07:55 | So when I think of that in terms of
tone, this is a darker tone than these
| | 08:00 | yellow flowers, you may wonder, well,
where did some of our yellow go?
| | 08:03 | That's just in the process of putting
these flowers in she has blocked out
| | 08:07 | these, so they are not--there aren't as many
yellow pixels in the frame as there were before,
| | 08:12 | so there aren't as many data
points in this part of the histogram.
| | 08:15 | She is going to bring in some more flowers now.
| | 08:16 | These are all kind of mid-tone flowers
and a couple of other bright and dark tones.
| | 08:21 | They're just going to fill
in the histogram even more.
| | 08:24 | So all I know now is I have a lot of dark tones.
| | 08:27 | This image has far more dark tones than
light tones. And that's going to be all
| | 08:31 | of this stuff here, the shadows
back here, these, and these, and these.
| | 08:34 | As you can see, there's no
relationship between location on the frame and
| | 08:39 | place in the histogram.
| | 08:40 | The histogram is just representing how many
different points of tone there are in the image.
| | 08:46 | Then I've got these lighter tones over here.
| | 08:49 | For the most part, she has completely
blocked out the gray background, so that big
| | 08:52 | spike that we had there is gone.
| | 08:54 | Watch what happens as I zoom out.
| | 08:58 | It's starting to grow here.
| | 09:00 | There's this weird growth in my histogram.
| | 09:02 | That's because I am getting
these gray tones back in here.
| | 09:05 | As I zoom out further, that goes up
higher, and I just start getting more and
| | 09:10 | more and more of it as more of the
frame becomes gray. And I am dropping out
| | 09:16 | a lot of color here because fewer pixels
in the frame are these light and dark tones.
| | 09:24 | Again, the histogram is a critical tool
when you are shooting in the field for
| | 09:28 | understanding when you've over- and
underexposed, because you can't trust your LCD screen.
| | 09:32 | The histogram also has phenomenal
use in post production obviously.
| | 09:35 | We are not going to cover that here.
| | 09:37 | A live histogram is not
something that I use a lot.
| | 09:40 | I find it's a little too confusing to seeing it
change all the time as I move my camera around.
| | 09:47 | I mean if I start doing this,
the histogram is just constantly moving, and if I am
| | 09:50 | trying to handhold it, I
just don't find that useful.
| | 09:53 | It's much easier to simply take a shot
and then afterwards review it on the camera.
| | 09:58 | We are going to take a look at some
camera-generated histograms and some more
| | 10:01 | real-world examples in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Real-world histograms | 00:00 | Earlier we looked at a live histogram
display from a camera. That's where I see a
| | 00:05 | histogram superimposed over my scene on
my LCD screen on the back of my camera.
| | 00:10 | A live histogram can be useful.
| | 00:12 | The problem with it is, as you move
the camera around, the histogram is
| | 00:15 | jumping all around.
| | 00:16 | I find it pretty complicated.
| | 00:17 | I prefer to work by shooting an image
and then reviewing the image and turning
| | 00:21 | on a histogram display on the back of my camera.
| | 00:23 | Here is a kind of a typical information
view in playback mode on a camera, and
| | 00:28 | as you can see, I have got a histogram here.
| | 00:30 | If you go into playback mode on your
camera, and you don't see a histogram,
| | 00:33 | you will just see a big full-screen image,
maybe with some of this exposure data or not,
| | 00:38 | it doesn't mean your camera
can't generate a histogram.
| | 00:41 | It may just mean that you have to cycle
through a couple of different screens of
| | 00:44 | information before you
get to something like this.
| | 00:47 | And here you can see exactly what we saw before.
| | 00:49 | This is a typical histogram.
| | 00:50 | I have got black over here, white over
here, and so what I am seeing from this
| | 00:53 | image is that I don't have any
real strong black in this image.
| | 00:57 | I don't have any actual white.
| | 00:58 | The bulk of my tones are
down here below middle gray.
| | 01:02 | So, this is kind of a typical
histogram view that you would see in a camera.
| | 01:06 | What I want to do now though is look
at some real-world examples of just
| | 01:11 | some more histograms, just because you kind
of need practice learning to read a histogram.
| | 01:15 | Here, I have got an image, a grayscale
image, and you can see again, this is a
| | 01:19 | histogram generated by Photoshop.
| | 01:21 | So it doesn't really matter
who is generating the histogram.
| | 01:24 | It's still just a bar chart of the
distribution of tones in my image, with black
| | 01:28 | on the left, white on the right.
| | 01:30 | So, I am lacking the full black here,
and that's why the image maybe lacks a
| | 01:33 | little bit of punch,
| | 01:34 | these dark shadows over here that
should be complete black or not.
| | 01:38 | I have got a little tiny bit of
overexposure. That's what this spike is over here
| | 01:42 | on the right side, and that's probably
coming from these white bits in here.
| | 01:45 | I have got a lot of gray, dark gray.
That's probably going to be the baby
| | 01:48 | flamingo and just the dirt here.
| | 01:51 | These darker tones are going to be
all these shadows and things back here.
| | 01:54 | Here is a color image.
| | 01:56 | This image is underexposed, and I can tell
because there is a big black spike on the left side.
| | 02:02 | Now, I can also tell because there is a
whole bunch of black over here that lost
| | 02:06 | all detail back here.
| | 02:07 | In this case, I don't mind.
| | 02:09 | Loosing shadow detail is not always a
bad thing. But again, what's nice about
| | 02:13 | having the histogram is that I can
tell this on the back of my camera.
| | 02:16 | No matter what the image looks like,
the histogram tells me I have lost
| | 02:19 | detail in my shadows;
| | 02:21 | overall the image is pretty dark.
| | 02:22 | I don't have any really bright white stuff.
| | 02:26 | Here is the opposite problem,
an image that's overexposed.
| | 02:28 | I have got a spike over here.
| | 02:30 | Actually, I have also got a
little bit of underexposure.
| | 02:32 | So, these white bits, I had lost some
detail on the fur here, the black bits, I
| | 02:36 | have lost some detail in here.
| | 02:37 | But I have got a good amount of data overall.
| | 02:40 | So far, none of these
histograms are necessarily incorrect.
| | 02:44 | This image, for example, is for the most
part, I would consider this well exposed.
| | 02:48 | Yes, I don't have a whole bunch of
white over here, but there is nothing really
| | 02:51 | bright white in the image.
| | 02:52 | If I expose it too much more, I am going
to lose detail on this part of her skirt.
| | 02:57 | So, again, there is no correct shape;
you want a histogram that corresponds well
| | 03:01 | to the actual tones in your image.
| | 03:03 | Right now, we are just
practicing reading the histogram.
| | 03:06 | This image is low contrast.
| | 03:07 | Now, you can tell that by looking at the image.
| | 03:09 | It looks pretty dull and flat,
and that's because it was shot on kind of a hazy
| | 03:13 | day, in the middle of the day.
| | 03:14 | But when I look at this on the back of my
camera, it might be punched up a little bit.
| | 03:18 | So fortunately, I have a histogram
that shows me there is essentially no
| | 03:21 | black, no white, and for the most part
all the tones are gathered in the
| | 03:24 | middle of the histogram.
| | 03:26 | There is not a lot of distance
between the darkest significant tone and the
| | 03:29 | lightest significant tone, meaning there is
not a lot of contrast between these two points.
| | 03:34 | This was a case where I shot the
image, and because I knew that it was a
| | 03:37 | potentially low-contrast scene, I
looked at the histogram, saw that there
| | 03:40 | wasn't a lot of data here,
| | 03:42 | so I increased my exposure
using exposure compensation.
| | 03:44 | I went up about 2/3rds of a stop, and
look: I have picked up a lot more detail.
| | 03:48 | There is still no dark black, there is
no white, but I have got a nice range, a
| | 03:53 | bigger range from the
darkest to the lightest tones.
| | 03:55 | What this means is I have more data to
play with when I get into my image editor.
| | 03:59 | I am going to be able to push these
dark tones further down, lift the light
| | 04:03 | tones up a little bit, and get
an image that's more contrasty.
| | 04:06 | Here is an image that appears
to lack a lot of midtone data.
| | 04:11 | It's got a whole bunch of shadows,
and it's got a bright highlight over here.
| | 04:14 | But this histogram is pretty good for
this image, because this image doesn't have
| | 04:17 | a lot of mid-tone data;
| | 04:18 | it's mostly some really dark
shadows, a bunch of bright highlights.
| | 04:22 | So you don't necessarily always look
for that histogram that's the perfect
| | 04:26 | distribution from a little bit of black
into some nice white with every shade of
| | 04:30 | gray in between; the histogram has
to represent what's in your image.
| | 04:34 | If you are shooting a penguin on a
black-and-white checked tablecloth, you are
| | 04:37 | going to have a bunch of dark tones and
a bunch of light tones and not much in
| | 04:40 | between. That's kind
of what we have got here.
| | 04:42 | So this histogram is
correct for what's in our image.
| | 04:45 | You camera might display a
histogram that looks something like this.
| | 04:48 | Now, I am looking at two
different shots of an image here.
| | 04:51 | I am seeing four different histograms.
| | 04:53 | This is the overall composite histogram,
like we have been looking at, but it's
| | 04:57 | also giving me a separate histogram
for the red, green and blue Channels, for
| | 05:02 | the red, green and blue
information in the image.
| | 05:04 | And what this can be useful for is detecting
when you have possibly got a bad white balance.
| | 05:09 | And here is one where you can see
that I was shooting with tungsten white
| | 05:12 | balance, even though I was outside at night.
| | 05:15 | And here notice that the histograms
are all kind of in the same place.
| | 05:19 | They are kind of registered.
| | 05:20 | This hump is all on the same spot on
each histogram, and that means that my red,
| | 05:24 | green, and blue are combining
properly to make true white.
| | 05:28 | Here, I have got more blue in these
upper tones, and that's giving my image
| | 05:33 | more of a color cast.
| | 05:35 | So, your histogram can also be useful
for predicting and determining if you have
| | 05:39 | got a color cast in your image.
| | 05:41 | The histogram will make more sense as
you practice, particularly once you get
| | 05:44 | into your image editor.
| | 05:45 | That's an essential tool at both,
when you are shooting and when you
| | 05:48 | are editing.
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| Tone and color| 00:00 | Earlier you saw how we can control tone
through exposure--that is, we can darken
| | 00:06 | a tone by underexposing to put
it back to its true dark value.
| | 00:11 | Remember, your light meter is assuming
that everything it's pointed at is
| | 00:14 | middle gray and is trying to calculate
exposure settings that will reproduce the
| | 00:18 | scene as middle gray.
| | 00:20 | Tone also has an impact on color.
| | 00:22 | Take a look at our flowers again.
| | 00:24 | This is a different set
than we have used before.
| | 00:27 | My light meter is looking at them and
assuming that they are middle gray, and
| | 00:30 | it's calculating some exposure values to
reproduce them as middle gray, and here
| | 00:33 | is what it's coming up with here.
| | 00:35 | Now, they look pretty good.
| | 00:36 | They look like colorful flowers.
But as I look at the scene with my eye, I see
| | 00:41 | that they are actually a little darker;
| | 00:42 | they are a little more
saturated than what I am getting here.
| | 00:44 | If I dial in just a tiny little bit
of exposure compensation, I am going to
| | 00:48 | dial in a 1/3rd-stop exposure compensation
and watch what happens to these tones in here.
| | 00:56 | They get just a little more saturated.
| | 00:58 | Now, I am sure you notice the
background getting darker too.
| | 01:00 | There's no way around that.
| | 01:01 | I am lowering my exposure.
| | 01:03 | But again, watch the difference in the color.
| | 01:05 | I am going to put it back to
where the camera wants to meter.
| | 01:06 | It's just a little bit lighter.
| | 01:09 | That may not seem like much, but that
will show up in print, that difference.
| | 01:12 | Let's go to a 2/3rds stop down,
and they saturate a little more.
| | 01:17 | This is getting back to the idea
that color has a tone. Just the way
| | 01:21 | black-and-white objects have a tone
from black to white, color objects have
| | 01:25 | a tone from, in this case very, very dark
orange to lighter orange on the highlights.
| | 01:30 | We can increase the saturation of colored
images, dark-toned color images by underexposing.
| | 01:36 | If you have ever shot slide film,
you're probably already used to this.
| | 01:39 | The general rule with shooting slide
film is that you want a little bit of
| | 01:42 | underexposure to get your
colors nice and deep and rich.
| | 01:45 | And that can be true when you are
shooting with your digital camera, when
| | 01:48 | you are shooting JPEGs.
| | 01:49 | It's a little bit different when you are
shooting RAW. But for the most part, if
| | 01:53 | you underexpose a little bit,
you will get deeper, richer colors.
| | 01:57 | That doesn't mean you want to
necessarily walk around all the time with your
| | 01:59 | camera set to underexpose by a 3rd of a stop.
| | 02:01 | But if there are times where you are
shooting some darker colors, you want to be
| | 02:04 | sure they are really saturated,
| | 02:05 | then maybe bracket your exposure--that
is, shoot one normal, then underexpose a
| | 02:10 | little bit, shoot another one.
| | 02:11 | You may find when you get home that
that underexposed one has slightly
| | 02:14 | better color.
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| Auto exposure bracketing| 00:00 | Even once you understand the manual
control that you have over exposure, there
| | 00:04 | will, of course, be times when you are
just not sure what the right exposure is;
| | 00:07 | sometimes your camera gets confused, also.
| | 00:10 | I've got this scene here,
which is a little bit tricky.
| | 00:11 | I've got the stump in the foreground,
which I like because it gives me a good
| | 00:14 | strong subject in my image,
and I've got this nice background.
| | 00:18 | I have got a mountainside in the
background and these trees and these leaves.
| | 00:21 | I want to take a shot that
that encompasses all of these.
| | 00:23 | So I am in aperture priority mode, at f
11 to be sure that I have got a nice,
| | 00:28 | deep depth of field, but watch
what happens when I take my shot.
| | 00:32 | Overall, the exposure is good,
but look at the stump here. It's pretty dark.
| | 00:36 | I have lost a lot of detail
in the front of the stump.
| | 00:38 | It would be very nice to have more
detail their, which means I need to brighten
| | 00:42 | up the image, which means I am
going to do an overexposure.
| | 00:44 | Now, this part you should understand already.
| | 00:46 | I am going to dial in a one-stop over
exposure, and take another shot, and this
| | 00:53 | is definitely better.
| | 00:54 | I have now got detail on the stump, but look
what's happening back here in the background.
| | 00:58 | This is going out to almost complete white.
I'm losing a lot of details, so that's no good.
| | 01:04 | So maybe I need to try an underexposure.
| | 01:07 | So I am going to dial down
| | 01:09 | on the meter and then dial down
one stop, and here is another one.
| | 01:14 | This one is pretty good.
| | 01:15 | My rock has gone darker,
but now I have got detail back there.
| | 01:18 | So which is the right one?
| | 01:19 | Well, any of these are going to
require work in my image editor.
| | 01:22 | So what's nice is I have got what's
called a bracketed inset of images here.
| | 01:27 | I shot according to have a meter wanted.
| | 01:29 | I did a little bit of overexposure to
put some detail back in the shadow areas.
| | 01:32 | I did another shot with underexposure
to put detail back in the highlight areas.
| | 01:36 | I am not sure yet, while I am out
here in the field, how to go about fixing
| | 01:39 | that. But thanks to the fact
that I have got these three shots,
| | 01:42 | when I get back to my image editor, I've got
a lot of different things to try, a lot
| | 01:45 | of different things to play with.
| | 01:47 | That's called bracketing.
| | 01:48 | That's called exposure bracketing.
And your camera can actually do it for you
| | 01:51 | with a feature called auto exposure bracketing.
| | 01:54 | When I turn it on, all that's going
to happen is when I press the shutter
| | 01:56 | button I got a shot as the camera wants
to meter, next time I press it I get a
| | 02:00 | shot that's underexposed, the next time I
press it, I get a shot that's overexposed.
| | 02:05 | So I am going to turn that feature on
now, and obviously different cameras'
| | 02:10 | controls will be different.
| | 02:11 | Yours may not look like this.
| | 02:13 | In this case, I am going to dial in a
one-stop bracket in both directions.
| | 02:20 | Now, some cameras will allow you to
do more than just three exposures, some
| | 02:23 | cameras will allow you to do a seven-stop
bracket or some maybe just two-stop bracket.
| | 02:28 | They will also allows you to change
how much space happens between each shot:
| | 02:32 | one stop, a third of a stop, 2 stops,
| | 02:34 | 2/3rd of a stop, however much you want.
| | 02:36 | So I have dialed in a one-stop increment.
| | 02:40 | That's going be three shots.
| | 02:41 | So here comes my shot as metered,
| | 02:45 | now a shot underexposed,
| | 02:48 | now a shot overexposed.
| | 02:50 | So let's add one more wrinkle here.
| | 02:52 | I had to go to the trouble of pressing
the shutter button three whole times, and
| | 02:57 | I don't have whole day.
| | 02:58 | My productivity is plummeting by
having to do that over and over and over.
| | 03:01 | So I am going to turn on my camera's
drive mode, sometimes called burst mode,
| | 03:05 | and the way this works is now as long
as I hold the button down, I will get--I
| | 03:10 | will continue to shot exposures.
Because auto bracketing is turned on, the
| | 03:13 | bracketing is going be in there also.
| | 03:14 | So now if I just now push and
hold the button, there is three shots
| | 03:18 | automatically bracketed
the way that I specified.
| | 03:21 | Auto exposure bracketing with drive
mode is also a really good thing to do if
| | 03:24 | you are trying to bracket a shot where
something is changing, and you want to be
| | 03:28 | sure that your three
frames are as close as possible.
| | 03:30 | So again, to get these images working,
I need to take them into my image
| | 03:34 | editor and work with them, but there is
something else that I can do with the bracketed set,
| | 03:37 | something called high dynamic range
imaging, which is something way beyond
| | 03:42 | scope of this course, but you can learn about it
in the "Landscape Photography for Photoshop CS5".
| | 03:47 | We cover high dynamic range
imaging using the same example.
| | 03:51 | If you don't know what that term
"dynamic range" means, don't worry. We are going
| | 03:55 | to cover it in detail in the next chapter.
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| Exercise: Go work with exposure compensation| 00:00 | Exposure compensation is probably the
single exposure control that you'll use the most.
| | 00:06 | As you have seen, with it you can
correct back-lighting problems, you can
| | 00:10 | restore proper tone to light or dark
object, and you can help ensure that your
| | 00:13 | subject is neither over- nor underexposed.
| | 00:16 | Exposure compensation is great for
anytime you need to over- or underexpose but
| | 00:21 | you don't care about how depth of
field or motion stopping might change.
| | 00:25 | In general, since exposure
compensation can only go up to two stops in
| | 00:28 | either direction, you won't see a
huge change in either depth of field or
| | 00:32 | motion stopping anyway.
| | 00:33 | In other words, if you simply need to
make an image brighter or darker, exposure
| | 00:38 | compensation is the way to go.
| | 00:39 | So take some time to practice with your
exposure compensation control, make sure
| | 00:44 | you can access it quickly without even
taking your eye from the viewfinder,
| | 00:48 | find some back-lighting situations or
other high-dynamic-range situations and
| | 00:52 | see what happens to the darker and
lighter parts of your images as you dial in
| | 00:56 | more or less exposure compensation.
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|
|
10. Dynamic RangeDynamic range| 00:00 | One of the most incredible things about your
eyes is the range of light that they can see in.
| | 00:05 | When your eyes are completely adjusted
to the dark, they can detect a single
| | 00:09 | photon of light. But then you can take
those same eyes out into bright daylight
| | 00:12 | and discern details on brightly lit objects.
| | 00:15 | What's more amazing though, is that you can
see a huge range of dark to light at one time.
| | 00:20 | This is referred to as dynamic range,
and your eye has a dynamic range of around
| | 00:25 | 18-20 stops worth of light.
| | 00:27 | By comparison, your digital camera has
a dynamic range of about 10-12 stops of
| | 00:32 | light, maybe 14 if you are really lucky.
| | 00:35 | In other words, your eye can see almost
double the range of light to dark that
| | 00:39 | your camera can capture.
| | 00:41 | It's very important to understand that
just because a scene looks a particular
| | 00:44 | way to your eye, that doesn't mean that
your camera will be able to capture it.
| | 00:48 | For example, I was hiking
in the bottom of a canyon.
| | 00:51 | It was dark on the canyon floor,
but the sky was bright daylight.
| | 00:55 | My eye had no trouble seeing detail from
the canyon floor to the sky, but when I
| | 00:59 | pointed my camera at the scene and took
a shot, I ended up with a canyon floor
| | 01:03 | that was plunged into
darkness with bright sky up above.
| | 01:07 | In other words, my camera did not have
the dynamic range required to capture the
| | 01:11 | whole scene in the way
that my eye was seeing it.
| | 01:14 | By default, the camera metered with the
idea of preserving the bright areas and
| | 01:17 | so it exposed for the sky,
leaving the canyon floor in darkness.
| | 01:21 | Seeing that this wasn't working, I
change my exposure settings to overexpose, so
| | 01:26 | that I would brighten up the
canyon floor, and I got this.
| | 01:29 | Sure enough, you can see detail on the floor,
but now the sky is blown out to complete white.
| | 01:34 | In the end, there is no way that you can
shoot a single frame of this scene that
| | 01:38 | can capture the full dynamic
range that you can see with your eyes.
| | 01:42 | Now, I can cheat, and I can composite
those two images to arrive in a finished
| | 01:46 | image that looks like this, but very
often multiple shots aren't possible.
| | 01:50 | If there are moving objects or people or waving
trees, then multiple shots just may not work.
| | 01:56 | Very often when in a high-dynamic-
range situation, you will have to decide
| | 02:00 | if it's the highlight or shadow detail
that is more important, and expose accordingly.
| | 02:05 | Expectation leads to as many bad photos as
lack of technical skill. You see a scene.
| | 02:10 | You take a picture.
| | 02:10 | You expect the picture to look like the
scene, because it looked fine to your eyes.
| | 02:14 | It's very important that you learn
to recognize when your scene has more
| | 02:18 | dynamic range than your camera can
capture, so that you can make the appropriate
| | 02:22 | exposure adjustments.
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| Exposing for highlights| 00:00 | All of this theory that we've been
talking about, this is not just something
| | 00:03 | that you study at home and think about
and then go, "Okay, that's in there. Now, I am
| | 00:06 | going to go shooting."
| | 00:07 | You think about it when you're in the field.
| | 00:08 | You work through the same types of
thoughts in your head that we've been talking
| | 00:12 | about in the studio in a very theoretical way.
| | 00:14 | And this shot that we found
right here is a fine example.
| | 00:18 | So we're driving down this road,
and I've got this nice road going into distance
| | 00:22 | with these pretty shady trees.
| | 00:24 | And there is something in the
background that you can't actually see right now.
| | 00:27 | The video cameras we are using is a
digital image sensor, just the way my SLR does.
| | 00:32 | And like my SLR, it's got a much
lower dynamic range than my eye has.
| | 00:37 | So right now what you're
seeing in the sky is just white.
| | 00:40 | So I'm going to ask the camera operator
to change the exposure, so that we can
| | 00:44 | see what's actually up there.
| | 00:45 | And you should be able to see that look, there
is a mountain looming there in the distance.
| | 00:49 | Now, when I walked into this scene, I
was able to actually just see all that.
| | 00:52 | I was able to see nice dark shadow,
and road, and mountain looming in the distance.
| | 00:56 | This is shot I want to take.
| | 00:58 | What needs to happen next is right
away I need to recognize that's a lot of
| | 01:01 | dynamic range in that scene.
| | 01:02 | I can't just hop out of my car, snap off
that picture, and hop back in. I've got to
| | 01:05 | stop and think about this situation.
| | 01:07 | High dynamic range, more stops of
light then my camera can capture,
| | 01:11 | even though my eye is
seeing everything just fine.
| | 01:14 | So I'm going to need to think about my
exposure a little bit and use a little
| | 01:18 | exposure compensation to be
sure that the mountain is visible.
| | 01:21 | Watch what happens if I take a
shot as the camera has metered.
| | 01:25 | This is a landscape shot. I know I want
deep depth of field, so I put my camera
| | 01:28 | in aperture priority mode to give me
control of aperture, because aperture is
| | 01:32 | what controls depth of field.
| | 01:33 | I've dialed down to F11, which is
going to give me a very depth of field.
| | 01:37 | I'm going to take my shot.
| | 01:37 | I've already focus the camera, so
I'm just going to knock one off there.
| | 01:42 | This is what we got, and sure
enough there is no mountain back there.
| | 01:46 | It's all overexposed.
| | 01:47 | It's gone out to complete white.
| | 01:49 | So what I need to do is think about
exposing for the highlights in this image,
| | 01:53 | protecting the highlights by
choosing an exposure compensation
| | 01:56 | that's going to be sure that the mountain,
which is the big highlight area, is okay.
| | 02:00 | I'm going to dial in an underexposure.
| | 02:03 | When I underexpose, the
mountain is going to darken.
| | 02:04 | I'm going to get detail on it, and actually for
that matter, I going to be able to see it all.
| | 02:09 | I want to get some detail on it.
| | 02:10 | I'm also going to pull
some color back into the sky.
| | 02:11 | Now, when I do that underexposure, the dark
parts of my image are also going to go darker.
| | 02:16 | They may not go so dark that I can't see them,
but even if they do, that may not matter.
| | 02:21 | When a shadow goes dark, we
just think it's a really dark shadow.
| | 02:24 | When a bright highlight goes
bright, it's a big empty spot in our image.
| | 02:27 | So you are much safer often losing
your shadows than you are when you
| | 02:30 | lose your highlights.
| | 02:32 | The other thing is that light and
shadow, that's the vocabulary of photography.
| | 02:35 | Its nice having images without detail in them
sometimes, against images with lots of detail.
| | 02:39 | These are some of the aesthetics that
you work with when you're working with
| | 02:43 | light in a nice image.
| | 02:45 | So what I'm going to do now is dial
in an underexposure using my exposure
| | 02:48 | compensation control.
| | 02:49 | Now remember, this is landscape I want
to deep depth of field, so I want to be sure
| | 02:53 | I preserve aperture control.
| | 02:56 | If I'm in program mode, and I dial in
an exposure compensation, I don't actually
| | 02:59 | know how the camera is
going to get the compensation.
| | 03:01 | If I tell it I want it underexposed
by one stop, it might underexpose by
| | 03:05 | changing shutter speed or aperture.
Or if I'm in auto ISO mode, it might make
| | 03:09 | tiny little ISO changes.
| | 03:10 | If I make changes to all three, I
don't want it touching my aperture setting.
| | 03:15 | Fortunately, when I'm in aperture
priority, any exposure compensation changes I
| | 03:18 | make will be made to shutter speed.
| | 03:21 | So I am on a tripod. I don't care
if my shutter speed goes too low.
| | 03:24 | I'm going to dial in one stop of
underexposure. Now, how do I know one stop?
| | 03:29 | I don't. I'm just starting with one stop,
and we'll see what's going to happen.
| | 03:32 | I take the shot, and there it is.
There is my mountain looming in the background.
| | 03:37 | So now I've got detail on the mountain.
| | 03:39 | These shadows have got a little bit darker.
| | 03:41 | I can choose to brighten them up,
| | 03:42 | I could choose to darken them further,
or I can leave them alone. That's an
| | 03:45 | aesthetic choice that I get to make later.
| | 03:47 | I don't need another shot here; one shot
was plenty to bring the mountain back.
| | 03:51 | So very often in a high-dynamic-range
situation, this is the type of process that
| | 03:55 | you're going to go through.
| | 03:56 | You're going to take a shot, maybe
review it on the screen, or maybe you're not
| | 03:59 | even going to bother with that first shot.
| | 04:00 | You're going to come into it and go
"That mountain is just too bright. I'm going to
| | 04:03 | start with an underexposure."
| | 04:04 | The point is I'm trying to protect highlights.
| | 04:07 | I don't want them to go white, and I'm
doing that by underexposing them to pull
| | 04:11 | them back into range, so
that I can see those details.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fill flash| 00:00 | We're going to take a break for a minute
from dynamic range to discuss something
| | 00:03 | that's kind of loosely related to dynamic range.
| | 00:06 | We have been seeing how your eye can
see a tremendous range of dark to light,
| | 00:10 | wider than what your camera can see.
| | 00:12 | And we've been talking about
how sometimes you have to choose.
| | 00:14 | You have to choose to expose for the
shadows or choose to expose for the highlights.
| | 00:18 | There are other times when you're going
to run into situations where your shot
| | 00:21 | has extreme highlight and extreme shadow in
it, and you don't want the shadow. You just--
| | 00:26 | you don't what the flies either--
but you don't want the shadows, you just
| | 00:28 | want the highlights.
| | 00:29 | So what we're going to talk about
now is something called fill flash.
| | 00:32 | Now that may come as a bit of a surprise
to you because as you can probably tell,
| | 00:35 | I'm standing in full-on, bright daylight.
| | 00:38 | And most people think that flash
is something that you use at night.
| | 00:41 | And flash does have its uses at night,
but you might be very surprised to find
| | 00:46 | that you're going to using your flash more in
daylight than at night. And here is why.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to take a portrait here
without my flash. And my subject here is up
| | 00:56 | against a really bright background,
and his face is partly in shadow.
| | 01:01 | So what I get when I take the shot is
an image of his face largely plunged into
| | 01:08 | shadow, with a big bright
highlight on the other side.
| | 01:10 | I would like to have pretty
even exposure across his face.
| | 01:12 | I'd like to get rid of that shadow.
| | 01:14 | So I'm going to just pop
up the flash on my camera.
| | 01:17 | It's all set in its default mode.
| | 01:19 | I'm shooting in program mode right now.
And now when I take the shot, you could
| | 01:25 | see that the flash fills in all that
shadow on the other side of his face, giving
| | 01:29 | a very even exposure.
| | 01:31 | I can simply see his face much more
clearly, and it looks fairly natural.
| | 01:34 | It doesn't look like a flash shot.
| | 01:36 | He doesn't have bright garish tones in him.
| | 01:38 | This is a very, very common use of fill flash.
| | 01:41 | When you get out in daylight don't
forget to check for those shadows that might
| | 01:45 | obscure certain details.
| | 01:47 | This type of composition is not the
only time that you will fill flash.
| | 01:51 | There are other occasions.
| | 01:52 | So here is another example.
| | 01:55 | I've a model here wearing a hat.
| | 01:57 | Now, this isn't a really high-
dynamic-range situation, but it an uneven-
| | 02:01 | exposure situation.
| | 02:02 | The hat is casting a shadow onto her face,
and part of her face is still in sunlight.
| | 02:07 | I can use my fill flash to even out
that exposure and brighten up that shadow
| | 02:12 | underneath her hat and
put detail back in her eyes.
| | 02:16 | So let's take a look at what it
looks like if I shoot without the flash.
| | 02:18 | I'm in program mode. Very
simple. And here is our shot.
| | 02:23 | Exposure is not bad, but there is a
pronounced shadow on her eyes and on her face.
| | 02:28 | I'm going to pop up of my flash,
still in program mode, and here we go again,
| | 02:34 | and here is the result.
| | 02:36 | And as you can see, we've got much
better fill on her eyes and generally
| | 02:41 | overall even exposure.
| | 02:43 | This is the same trick you're going to
want to use if someone's standing under a
| | 02:46 | tree, under an eave; anything that's
casting a shadow on their face where the rest
| | 02:51 | of their body is in sunlight, you
just want to even all that out.
| | 02:54 | So again, flash is not something that
you only use in low light or at night.
| | 02:58 | It has its uses there, but you might
find that more often than not you're
| | 03:02 | mostly using your flash in the
daytime to even out exposure.
| | 03:05 | So don't think of flash as a low-light-
only thing. Don't forget to use it even
| | 03:09 | in bright situations.
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| Three solutions to the same problem| 00:00 | I've got a problem; my subject
here is horribly backlit.
| | 00:04 | Now this is something you have
seen a lot of during this course,
| | 00:06 | so you should know by now that
while I have got this problem,
| | 00:09 | I have also got three possible solutions.
| | 00:12 | These are all things you have seen before.
| | 00:13 | I am going to go over them again, real quick.
| | 00:15 | So there's bad backlighting behind him.
| | 00:17 | I am in program mode right now, and I
am in program mode because I just want
| | 00:21 | a nice shot of them.
| | 00:22 | And I am not really concerned right now
about depth of field and things like that.
| | 00:25 | And I know that my program mode is
going to choose some nice middling exposure
| | 00:29 | settings that are going to get me
good exposure and probably kind of soft
| | 00:32 | background, but normally care about that.
| | 00:34 | It's just a nice time to be shooting
in program mode, because I am going to be
| | 00:37 | able to work quickly and get what I want.
| | 00:38 | I am in matrix metering mode, as I said
but there's a lot of bright white behind
| | 00:42 | him. And when I take this shot, as you
have seen before, he is underexposed
| | 00:46 | because the camera is
metering for all that sky back there.
| | 00:48 | So what can I do about this? Well,
| | 00:50 | I can change metering modes.
| | 00:51 | I am going to switch over
to spot meter right now.
| | 00:54 | That's going to take a meter just--a
meter reading just off the middle of his
| | 00:57 | face, and that's going to brighten up his
face at the cost of the background. That's okay.
| | 01:03 | I am willing to lose the background.
| | 01:05 | I really want him there.
| | 01:06 | So that's one solution.
| | 01:08 | I am going to put my metering mode
back in matrix mode though, and now I am
| | 01:13 | going to overexpose. Using my
exposure compensation control,
| | 01:16 | I am going to dial in one stop of overexposure.
| | 01:19 | So I am going to intentionally
overexpose the shot to better expose his face,
| | 01:24 | again, at the cost of the background.
And as you have seen, there's no way I can
| | 01:27 | get this full dynamic range.
| | 01:28 | I am just having to choose here,
and that's simply the way photographic
| | 01:31 | technology is right now.
| | 01:33 | Put my exposure compensation back
where it was, and pull out my third
| | 01:38 | solution, which you may have already
guessed, and that's fill flash, as we
| | 01:41 | talked about before.
| | 01:42 | A lot of people think flash is for low
light and flash is hard to use in low
| | 01:46 | light, but what flash can be really useful
for though, is evening out an exposure.
| | 01:50 | By shining some light into his face, I
get some nice fill on his face, and I
| | 01:55 | still have a nicely exposed background.
| | 01:57 | Now, of all these three
choices, you can see that fill flash is
| | 02:00 | actually working the best.
| | 02:02 | Why are we going over all this
again if we have learned each of these
| | 02:04 | lessons separately?
| | 02:05 | One, just kind of
reiterate them and reinforce them.
| | 02:09 | But also to point out that you cannot
take a recipe approach to photography.
| | 02:13 | You can't say, "Well, when you are in a
backlight situation, this is what you do."
| | 02:17 | Because invariably the first time you
go out and do that, you are going to find
| | 02:20 | the exception to the rule.
| | 02:21 | You need to know all of this exposure theory;
| | 02:23 | you need to know all of these camera
mechanics because you never know which one
| | 02:27 | is going to be right for a particular situation.
| | 02:30 | These are all parts of your toolbox, and you
need to know every single tool in that toolbox--
| | 02:35 | not just to solve a situation like
this that can be solved by one of
| | 02:38 | these solutions, but to also know how
you can mix and match and combine them.
| | 02:41 | That's why we have gone over some things
that seem to be redundant or repetitive
| | 02:46 | or tools that seems to do
the same thing as each other,
| | 02:48 | because there is a trade off in all of them.
| | 02:50 | So having all of these tools under
your belt is going to allow you walk
| | 02:54 | into any type of exposure scene, try
a few things, experiment with a few things--
| | 02:58 | shooting digital is free;
| | 02:59 | it's not costing as any film or processing--
| | 03:01 | try as much as we can, until we
zero in on the right solution.
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|
|
11. Manual Mode Manual mode| 00:01 | Shutters speed, aperture, ISO;
| | 00:03 | hopefully by now you understand that
these perimeters are what exposure is.
| | 00:09 | You manipulate these three things in
concert to control motion blur, depth of
| | 00:13 | field, tonality, and to ensure sharp shooting.
| | 00:17 | How much motion blur or depth of
field or tonality is up to you.
| | 00:20 | But there's really nothing more to
exposure than these three values.
| | 00:24 | You have also learned that your light
meter makes it easier to choose values
| | 00:28 | that are right for your scene.
| | 00:30 | Your camera provides you with a
lot of different ways of controlling
| | 00:33 | your exposure settings.
| | 00:34 | But really whether you are in
full auto mode, program mode, shutter
| | 00:37 | priority, aperture priority, whether
you are regularly using program shift
| | 00:41 | and exposure compensation,
| | 00:42 | however you are shooting, none of
those controls change the fact that all you
| | 00:47 | are doing is choosing three
interrelated exposure values.
| | 00:51 | So far, you have seen how you can let
the camera choose those values for you in
| | 00:55 | auto and program mode,
| | 00:56 | how you can take control of
either aperture or shutter speed in the
| | 01:00 | appropriate priority mode.
| | 01:02 | Now we are going to move on to the big M,
| | 01:04 | Manual mode, wherein you have full
control over all three exposure parameters.
| | 01:10 | Before we look at manual mode though, I
want to reinforce that manual mode does
| | 01:13 | not suddenly open up a huge
range of new creative possibilities.
| | 01:17 | It's still those three parameters, and
for the most part any image that you can
| | 01:21 | shoot in one mode, you can
probably shoot it in another.
| | 01:24 | The reason you have different modes is
that for certain situations it's easier to
| | 01:28 | work with a single exposure parameter isolated.
| | 01:30 | Occasionally, as you will see, there are
some images that can only be taken when
| | 01:34 | you have full control of all three parameters.
| | 01:37 | But there's no hierarchy to shooting modes.
| | 01:39 | Don't think that as you get more
advanced, you are supposed to be leaving program
| | 01:42 | mode behind and graduating to priority
modes and then one day ascending in a
| | 01:47 | shaft of light to manual mode, wherein
you are now a master photographer;
| | 01:50 | it don't work that way.
| | 01:51 | You freely move from mode to mode
depending on which one gives you the control
| | 01:55 | you need for the particular
shot you are trying to take.
| | 01:59 | However, there are still a few
things you need to know about manual mode,
| | 02:01 | because once you switch to it, you will
find that your light meter works quite
| | 02:04 | a bit differently.
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| Manual mode and light meters| 00:00 | In manual mode, you have full control
of shutter speed and aperture, but it's
| | 00:05 | very important to understand that in
manual mode your light meter is going to
| | 00:08 | work differently than it did in
either the priority modes or program mode.
| | 00:12 | In those automatic modes when you
half-press the shutter button, the camera
| | 00:15 | meters the scene and then chooses a
shutter speed and aperture for you. Since
| | 00:19 | you are choosing those, there is kind
of nothing for it to do in that regard.
| | 00:23 | Take a look at this set.
| | 00:24 | We've got three cameras back on--well,
two cameras and a projector back on our set.
| | 00:28 | We are going to point our camera at it
in manual mode and look at what happens
| | 00:32 | to the meter as we move some settings around.
| | 00:35 | When you first go into manual mode,
what you are going to see are the last
| | 00:39 | shutter speed and aperture settings that
were used the last time you've used manual mode.
| | 00:44 | So a 10th a second at 6.3 were
the last manual settings I used whenever I
| | 00:49 | last used manual mode,
whenever that may have been.
| | 00:51 | Now I still need to half-press my
shutter button to autofocus. I do that, and
| | 00:56 | when I do it, meters the scene.
| | 00:58 | It does not meter the scene and change
anything; instead, it meters the scene, and
| | 01:04 | using my exposure compensation
indicator down here, tells me whether I am
| | 01:09 | properly exposed or not.
| | 01:10 | If it's in the middle,
then I am properly exposed.
| | 01:13 | If this was off to the side, I
would be either over- or underexposed.
| | 01:16 | So we are here at F 6.3.
| | 01:19 | Let's say that I want to ensure really
deep depth of field, so I want to go to a
| | 01:23 | smaller aperture--that's a bigger number.
| | 01:25 | On this particular camera, when I am in
manual mode, I have got two wheels on
| | 01:29 | this camera, one of them controls
shutter speed, the other controls aperture.
| | 01:32 | Your camera may be a little
bit different in how it works.
| | 01:34 | So I am going to change my shutter speed.
| | 01:37 | First, I am going to re-meter
| | 01:38 | so we can see, as long as this thing is
up when I am changing my parameters, it
| | 01:43 | will move around, and I can see in
real time how my metering is going.
| | 01:46 | So that's my shutter speed control.
| | 01:48 | I am going to change my aperture up to
f 11 to get me deeper depth of field.
| | 01:53 | Obviously, my image is darkening,
closing my aperture down, and you can see,
| | 01:57 | you should have noticed as I was turning
it, this indicator, it was moving to the left.
| | 02:01 | So what the meter is telling me now is
that for my current settings--a 10th of a
| | 02:06 | second, at f 11--I am underexposed.
| | 02:09 | I am underexposed by 1 and 2/3rd stops.
| | 02:13 | So I can of course shoot it that way,
or I can try to change my exposure to get
| | 02:19 | it back up to where it needs to be.
| | 02:21 | I am going to put my camera on manual focus,
so that we don't keep having that refocusing.
| | 02:25 | So I want my aperture here.
| | 02:27 | I am not going to change that, because I
am going for deep depth of field; instead,
| | 02:29 | I am going to change my shutter speed.
| | 02:30 | I am going to slow it down.
| | 02:33 | As I do that, I went from the 10th of a
second to an 8th and my dial went up there,
| | 02:38 | so I can just turn this until it gets
back up to where it supposed to be, which
| | 02:42 | is 3rd of a second at f 11. But a 3rd of
a second is an awfully slow exposure.
| | 02:47 | I'd like to get that up a little bit
higher. Even though I am on a tripod,
| | 02:50 | camera shake can happen any time.
| | 02:51 | I am at ISO 400, so I am going to
increase my ISO to buy myself another stop.
| | 02:57 | So, I am going to go from 400 up to 800.
And now when I do that my image is overexposed.
| | 03:04 | You can see I am one stop overexposed.
| | 03:06 | I've made the sensor more sensitive,
and so it's getting more light with this
| | 03:11 | same set of exposure setting.
| | 03:12 | So, I am ready to change my shutter speed.
| | 03:15 | I am going to pull it so it's faster and get it
at a 6th of a second, at f 11. So I am at ISO.
| | 03:22 | I am back to ISO 800.
I am back to my good exposure.
| | 03:25 | I can take the shot.
| | 03:27 | This is how it works working with manual mode.
| | 03:30 | You've got to remember that your
light meter simply follows whatever it
| | 03:33 | is you've dialed in.
| | 03:34 | You are in full control of how much
light is going to hit the sensor. Your light
| | 03:38 | meter then just tells you whether it
thinks you've got too much or too little.
| | 03:41 | Bear in mind it still assuming that
you are pointed at something that is
| | 03:45 | middle gray, so it's still--
| | 03:47 | when it says right, what it means is
that it thinks you are saying something
| | 03:51 | that's middle gray, so there is a chance
that black things are not going to be as
| | 03:54 | black as they should be, so I might
want to underexpose, which I can do by just
| | 03:58 | changing whichever parameter I want.
| | 04:00 | In this case, I want to keep my aperture
where it is and work with shutter speed
| | 04:03 | until I get maybe my
exposure where I think it should be.
| | 04:06 | This is all there is to manual mode.
| | 04:08 | You are in full control.
| | 04:09 | You've got your light meter as a reference.
| | 04:10 | Is this better than working in a
program mode or aperture priority mode?
| | 04:16 | No, there is no better or worse, in any
universal sense, to any of these modes.
| | 04:20 | This might be better for certain
situations, just the way aperture priority mode
| | 04:24 | might be better for other
situations, or program mode still for others.
| | 04:27 | It's entirely a matter of taste.
| | 04:29 | It's a matter of how you like to work.
| | 04:31 | If you learned photography on an all-
manual camera, like some people did long,
| | 04:36 | long ago, then you might
be used to working this way.
| | 04:40 | So, manual mode is a great extra tool to
have in your photographic toolkit, and
| | 04:46 | it's also a good way to learn more
about exposure and reciprocity, and that's
| | 04:49 | what we're going to do in the
exercise in the next lesson.
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| Manual exposure exercise| 00:00 | We are going to harken back now to
those wonderful days of yesteryear when men
| | 00:04 | were men and women were women, and
photographers didn't have light meters.
| | 00:08 | Now, think about that.
| | 00:09 | Not having a light meter,
| | 00:11 | everything we have done so far in our
exposure exercises has been built around
| | 00:15 | the automatic light meter in our cameras.
We half-press the shutter button;
| | 00:19 | the camera meters the scene for us
and tells us a shutter speed and aperture.
| | 00:24 | What would you do if your
camera wasn't doing that for you?
| | 00:27 | Well, you can find out, and you can
play with it yourself, and have this
| | 00:30 | wonderful anachronistic feeling of
shooting the way people used to shoot.
| | 00:33 | But doing this is also a really
great way to go a little bit deeper into
| | 00:37 | exposure theory and really nail
down a couple of important ideas.
| | 00:41 | I have got my camera in manual mode,
and I am going to shoot a picture of
| | 00:44 | this stump right here.
| | 00:46 | So where do I begin?
| | 00:47 | Now, I could just follow my light meter,
because even in manual mode, my meter is
| | 00:50 | still doing something.
| | 00:52 | As you have seen, when I half-press to
expose, I get a little meter that tells
| | 00:56 | me whether I am over- or underexposed.
| | 00:58 | I am going to ignore that though, and I am
going to do things away the way I used to be done.
| | 01:02 | I am out here in bright sunlight.
| | 01:03 | Now, as with film, with your digital
image sensor, there is a starting point for
| | 01:08 | your daylight exposures, and that's
something called the sunny 16 rule.
| | 01:11 | And that goes like this.
| | 01:12 | If I am at F16 then my shutter speed
should be one over film speed, or one over
| | 01:18 | my ISO, to get a good exposure.
| | 01:21 | I am shooting at ISO 100, so if I put
my aperture at f16 and my shutter speed
| | 01:27 | at 1/100th of a second--that's one over my ISO
or 1/100--and take a shot, I get a decent exposure.
| | 01:35 | So right off the bat, great.
I am manually exposing here.
| | 01:38 | I am out in the wild just
surviving photographically on my wits,
| | 01:42 | thanks to the sunny 16 rule.
| | 01:44 | But what if this isn't the picture I want?
| | 01:46 | That's given me a good overall level of
illumination, but I would prefer to have
| | 01:50 | shallow depth of field in this shot.
| | 01:51 | I would like the mountains in
the background to go out of focus.
| | 01:54 | So, I need to get my aperture open,
because f 16 is very small, and that's going
| | 01:58 | to give me very deep depth of field,
so I want to open it up all the way.
| | 02:01 | This lens can open all the way to F4.
| | 02:03 | So I am going to change my aperture.
| | 02:05 | So I am using my manual controls here,
and I am going from f16 to f11. That's one stop.
| | 02:13 | And if you are not sure how I knew
that was one stop, its very simple:
| | 02:16 | I have just memorized the whole
stop aperture increments, which is that
| | 02:20 | something either you need to sit down
and expressly do, or that you will just
| | 02:24 | learn over time working with your camera.
| | 02:25 | So, that's one stop.
| | 02:27 | From f11, I am going to
go to f8. That's two stops.
| | 02:31 | From f8, I am going to go
to 5.6. That's three stops.
| | 02:34 | Again, I am just going in whole-stop
increment and from f5.6, I am going to go to f4.
| | 02:39 | So, I have opened my aperture four stops.
| | 02:42 | If I take a picture now, still at
1/100th of a second, I am using that same
| | 02:46 | shutter speed but my aperture is
much wider, four stops wider than it was
| | 02:49 | before--that's four doublings of light, which
means my image is going to be way overexposed.
| | 02:54 | So I need to compensate for that larger
aperture by speeding up my shutter speed
| | 02:59 | by the same amount, by four stops.
| | 03:01 | Shutter speed is a lot easier to
deal with. It's just straight doublings.
| | 03:03 | So I am at 100 right now, 1/100th of a second.
| | 03:06 | I am going to go to 200.
That's one doubling or one stop.
| | 03:09 | From 200, I am going to go to 400.
That's two stops. 800. That's three stops. And
| | 03:15 | one more, to 1,600. That's four stops.
| | 03:18 | Now, if I take a shot, I still
get a good exposure, and I have got
| | 03:24 | shallower depth of field.
| | 03:25 | The mountains are a little blurry back there.
| | 03:28 | But as I am looking at it, I am
recognizing that--and it's a good place to stop;
| | 03:32 | I am happy with my image, but I just
want to be safe about what I am taking home.
| | 03:36 | I am going through kind of a same process
| | 03:37 | I would if I was shooting in program mode,
which is I am looking at my scene going,
| | 03:41 | "There is a lot of dynamic range there.
| | 03:42 | I have got these kind of darker tones
in the foreground, and I have got bright
| | 03:45 | sky full of white clouds.
| | 03:47 | And they are not real well-defined clouds.
| | 03:48 | They are just kind of wispy, almost solid white.
| | 03:51 | I really don't want to
loose any detail in there.
| | 03:53 | I feel like I should
underexpose that shot a little bit."
| | 03:58 | I am at 1/1600th of a second.
| | 04:01 | I need a faster shutter speed. A faster
shutter speed is going to cut a little
| | 04:04 | bit of light out of there and get
me a little bit of under exposure.
| | 04:07 | My camera right now is set up to
change in 3, a 3rd-of-a-stop increments.
| | 04:12 | So I don't want to go a full stop under.
| | 04:15 | I think that's going to darken things too much.
| | 04:16 | I just know that from experience.
| | 04:17 | I am going to go one click on my dial.
That's going to be a 3rd of a stop, and
| | 04:21 | that gets me to 1/2,000th of a second.
| | 04:24 | So 1,600 to 2,000 is 1/3rd of stop.
| | 04:27 | I know that just from
reading my little dial here.
| | 04:29 | Now I take a shot, and I have now
got slight underexposure, and that's
| | 04:33 | protecting the clouds a little more.
| | 04:35 | I don't go out and shoot this way,
particularly in a situation like this,
| | 04:38 | particularly when there are bugs
flying around that I am swallowing.
| | 04:41 | It takes a long time.
| | 04:43 | What's nice about it is doing a little
practice like this is going to help drive
| | 04:48 | home some of these exposure theory concepts.
| | 04:50 | It's also going to give you a feeling
of what it's like to really stop and slow
| | 04:54 | down and take your time taking a picture.
| | 04:56 | That's how people used to have to work.
| | 04:58 | And it makes you a lot more
thoughtful about what you are doing.
| | 05:00 | It makes you really look at the scene
more. It makes you think more about what
| | 05:03 | kind of exposure you want in terms of
depth of field, in terms of what's my
| | 05:08 | dynamic range, and what do I want to capture.
| | 05:10 | It's a very good exercise for
learning how to slow down and get into a very
| | 05:13 | present place, which is where you need
to be both to see to be even able to
| | 05:17 | pay attention to what's going on around you
and to nail the technical aspect of things.
| | 05:21 | So, put your camera in manual mode and
go think through these reciprocal steps
| | 05:26 | like I did just here.
| | 05:26 | It is some good practice.
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|
|
12. Advanced Program ModeCustom modes and A-DEP| 00:00 | The great thing about there being so
many different ways to control exposure on
| | 00:04 | your camera is that you probably have
options that are perfectly suited to
| | 00:07 | specific shooting situations.
| | 00:09 | The drag of having all of these
controls is that it can be difficult to quickly
| | 00:13 | make a bunch of parameter changes
when you are working in the field.
| | 00:16 | But your camera might offer custom modes.
| | 00:19 | These are modes that can be
configured anyway you want.
| | 00:22 | For example, many Cannon and Nikon
SLRs offer custom modes right on their
| | 00:27 | standard mode control.
| | 00:29 | When I switch to one of these custom
modes, then the camera is immediately
| | 00:32 | configured with whatever settings
I have programmed into that mode.
| | 00:35 | For example, say that you
regularly shoot at swim meet.
| | 00:39 | Each time you go, you configure for
tungsten white balance, you set to aperture
| | 00:43 | priority and you change to f/2.8 because
you like shallow depth of field, and you
| | 00:47 | turn on burst mode, so that you
can shoot rapid burst of shots.
| | 00:51 | You can program all of those into a
custom mode, so that when you switch to that
| | 00:54 | mode, all of those parameters
are automatically configured.
| | 00:59 | If you are shooting with a Cannon SLR,
you might also have an A-DEP mode. This
| | 01:03 | will appear on your mode dial.
| | 01:04 | A-DEP is an automatic depth of field mode.
| | 01:07 | Its intention is to give you the deepest
possible depth of field for your scene.
| | 01:13 | So in A-DEP mode, you point your camera,
you press the shutter button halfway to
| | 01:16 | auto focus, and the camera
will do a bunch of calculations.
| | 01:19 | It will measure focus in a couple of
different places and try to choose an
| | 01:22 | aperture that will yield the
deepest possible depth of field.
| | 01:26 | Honestly, I have never found A-DEP mode
to work that well, but you might want to
| | 01:29 | play with it and see if it works for you.
| | 01:32 | If your camera offers custom modes,
it's worth digging into your manual to find
| | 01:36 | out how to use them.
| | 01:37 | They can be a great time saver.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Program shift| 00:00 | You've seen how you can use priority
modes and manual mode to take control of
| | 00:04 | your shutter speed and aperture
settings, but program mode is awfully nice
| | 00:08 | for everyday shooting.
| | 00:09 | Let's face it: there are lot of
times when you don't have any particular
| | 00:12 | creative agenda in mind; you just want
a well-exposed, sharp image, and that's
| | 00:16 | what program mode is for.
| | 00:18 | In program mode, your camera will always
try and choose a shutter speed that will
| | 00:21 | minimize the risk of hand-held shake
and a middling aperture setting that will
| | 00:26 | give you decent depth of field, but not
go so deep that you get a softening of
| | 00:29 | your image from diffraction artifacts.
| | 00:32 | If you just want to walk around, compose
shots and shoot, then program mode is a boon.
| | 00:36 | But some people get nervous
about program mode. They think, "Oh!
| | 00:40 | But what if I suddenly see a UFO,
and I want to be sure I can get a sharp
| | 00:44 | picture of it. I won't have time to
switch to shutter priority mode if I am in
| | 00:47 | program mode." Or maybe a scene unfolds
on the street and you want to insure that
| | 00:51 | you can shoot it with an
extremely deep depth of field.
| | 00:53 | If you are the type who doesn't want
to give up a finer degree of manual
| | 00:56 | control, I have good news.
| | 00:58 | Most SLRs, and even a few advanced
pointed shoots, have a feature called
| | 01:01 | program shift, which gives you a nice
level of manual control without ever
| | 01:05 | leaving program mode.
| | 01:06 | Here is how it works.
| | 01:08 | This should look pretty familiar to you now.
| | 01:10 | This is our three cameras
receding into the distance.
| | 01:14 | The scene either is potentially
needing a very deep depth of field, or I can
| | 01:17 | take shallow depth of field control.
| | 01:19 | Rather than switching to aperture
priority mode, I am going to use program shift.
| | 01:23 | So I am focusing on the middle camera,
and I am metering, and you can see that I
| | 01:29 | am coming in at 1/125th at f 4.5.
| | 01:32 | Take a note, I am at ISO 1,600 because
it's a little dark here in the studio.
| | 01:36 | I am on a tripod. I could even shoot at ISO 100.
| | 01:38 | If I do that, my shutter speeds are
going to go really slow, and that's going
| | 01:41 | to take time to shoot.
| | 01:42 | So I have cranked it up.
| | 01:44 | But again, I am coming in at 125 at 4.5.
| | 01:46 | 4.5 is pretty wide open.
| | 01:49 | So if I hit the depth of field
preview button, you see that my lens doesn't
| | 01:53 | really close down to any significant degree.
| | 01:55 | I have very shallow depth of field.
| | 01:57 | So this camera is in focus.
| | 01:59 | This one is out of focus.
| | 02:00 | That one is out of focus.
| | 02:02 | Let's say that I really want
to shoot this with sharp focus.
| | 02:04 | I could switch to aperture priority
mode and change my aperture and all that
| | 02:08 | kind of stuff, but I can actually do
this from program mode in this camera.
| | 02:12 | Again, I meter. It comes in at 125th and at 4.5.
| | 02:16 | Now there is a dial on this particular
camera, and it will vary in its location
| | 02:20 | depending on what type of camera you have.
| | 02:21 | This is the program shift control.
| | 02:23 | As I turn it, notice my shutter
speed and aperture are both changing.
| | 02:28 | Now you've learned about reciprocity.
| | 02:30 | You've learned that for any given
lighting situation, there are a big number of
| | 02:35 | exposure aperture combinations that
all yield the same level of illumination.
| | 02:40 | All I am seeing here are all of the
reciprocal combinations of shutter speed and
| | 02:44 | aperture that yield this level of illumination.
| | 02:47 | So as I am turning this dial, you are
not seeing a change in brightness, because
| | 02:51 | these are all yielding the
same level of brightness.
| | 02:53 | So I am just going to dial up
until I get a smaller aperture.
| | 02:57 | I am going to go up here to f13, so
that's going to be a pretty small aperture,
| | 03:00 | which should give me deeper depth of field.
| | 03:02 | Now when I hit the depth of field
preview button, I've got focus here, I've got
| | 03:08 | focus here, and of course my middle is focused.
| | 03:10 | So that's an aperture change in
program mode--actually it's both aperture and
| | 03:14 | shutter speed. But I was able to dial
in the combination that I wanted, to get
| | 03:18 | the effect that I wanted.
| | 03:19 | What's great about this
is I can work very quickly.
| | 03:22 | If I meter the scene, and it comes in
like this, it's nothing to quickly dial
| | 03:25 | over here to a smaller aperture.
| | 03:28 | Conversely, if I am out, and I am
shooting a flower or something, and I am in
| | 03:30 | program mode and decide I really want
shallow depth of field, I can just spin it
| | 03:33 | the other way and get a nice wide-open aperture.
| | 03:36 | So this gives me the convenience of
program mode shooting in that I can just
| | 03:39 | shoot, and the times when I need some
more manual control to achieve my creative
| | 03:44 | vision, I can just turn my program shift dial.
| | 03:47 | Check your manual to find out if your
camera has a program shift control and
| | 03:50 | how you operate it.
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| Exposure compensation with program shift | 00:00 | Shutter speed, aperture, and ISO are
all there is to exposure, and by now
| | 00:05 | you should be comfortable with the idea that
how you set those settings doesn't matter.
| | 00:11 | What makes a good photographer is not
whether he uses priority or manual mode or
| | 00:15 | program mode or whatever; what makes a
good photographer is whether he or she
| | 00:19 | understands what those three
exposure settings need to be to achieve a
| | 00:23 | particular end, or deal with
a particular type of light.
| | 00:26 | How you set them doesn't matter.
| | 00:27 | No one ever looked at a nicely
exposed pretty image and said, "Oh!
| | 00:31 | That's really nice.
| | 00:32 | It's too bad it was shot in program mode."
| | 00:33 | It just doesn't work that way.
| | 00:35 | We have looked at the exposure
compensation control, which allows you to tell the
| | 00:41 | camera to over- or underexpose above or
below what its meter thinks the scene
| | 00:45 | should be, and we have also looked at
program shift, which lets you cycle through
| | 00:49 | all of the reciprocal combinations
for any particular lighting situation.
| | 00:54 | Think for a moment now about how if
you are in program mode, the way that you
| | 00:57 | can combine those two settings.
| | 00:59 | I might see a scene.
| | 01:00 | I might be walking around, in program mode,
and I am in program mode because I want
| | 01:03 | to be able to just move quickly, and I
don't have any particular artistic goals
| | 01:06 | in mind. And maybe a scene starts
unfolding very quickly, and I need some manual
| | 01:10 | control. Having to figure out what mode
I might want to be in and switch might
| | 01:14 | take enough time that I can't get there.
| | 01:16 | But with the combination of program
shift and exposure compensation, I actually
| | 01:20 | have pretty much full manual
control when I am in program mode.
| | 01:24 | I can meter my scene in program mode,
use my program shift control to either get
| | 01:29 | to the aperture or shutter speed that
I want, and then if I decide I need some
| | 01:32 | over- or underexposure maybe for
backlight or to increase color saturation, I can
| | 01:36 | just dial in some exposure compensation.
| | 01:39 | That is basically allowing me to
select very specific apertures and shutter
| | 01:42 | speed without ever leaving program mode.
| | 01:45 | So those are two controls that it's a
good idea to get a get a strong handle on
| | 01:49 | and start practicing using them in
combination, because the two of them
| | 01:53 | combined with program mode might be
all the manual control you ever need for
| | 01:56 | some situations.
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| An exercise in reciprocity| 00:01 | It's time for more practice:
this time, program shift.
| | 00:03 | So get your camera, get out in the
field, and look for some deep and shallow
| | 00:07 | depth-of-field situations.
| | 00:09 | Keep your camera in program mode.
| | 00:11 | And maybe a situation like this, where I
have got receding into the distant, try
| | 00:16 | shooting with shallow and deep depth
of field, but don't go to aperture
| | 00:19 | priority mode to get that depth of field.
| | 00:21 | Use your program shift feature.
| | 00:23 | Meter in program mode, then change
your program shift control to dial in a
| | 00:28 | different set of reciprocal exposures
that give you the depth of field you want.
| | 00:31 | After you have done a little bit of that,
try and find some moving subject matter
| | 00:35 | and practice some shutter
speed control using program shift.
| | 00:39 | If you can find it, do a little program shift
exposure compensation exercise for yourself also.
| | 00:44 | Find a situation where you might want some
depth of field control and some tone control.
| | 00:48 | Program shift is an incredibly
handy tool, and it's really worth being
| | 00:52 | familiar with it.
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| Scene modes and in-camera processing| 00:00 | Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.
| | 00:04 | You've seen how these three
parameters give you control over brightness and
| | 00:07 | depth of field, motion control, tonality.
| | 00:10 | They are simply exposure.
| | 00:13 | You've also seen a number of ways of
controlling all of these parameters, but
| | 00:16 | there might still be a few
more items on your mode dial.
| | 00:18 | These are scene modes.
| | 00:21 | Scene modes typically have icons
representing specific type of scenes. For
| | 00:24 | example, you might have landscape,
portrait, night shooting, sports.
| | 00:29 | These are all automatic
modes, similar to program mode.
| | 00:32 | When you shoot with a scene mode, you
still need to half-press your shutter
| | 00:35 | button to focus, meter and white-
balance, wait till the camera beeps, and then
| | 00:39 | press the button rest of
the way to take your shot.
| | 00:41 | But in a scene mode, the camera biases
its exposure decisions for a specific type
| | 00:46 | of scene. For example, in landscape
mode, the camera will lean towards smaller
| | 00:51 | apertures for deeper depth of field.
In portrait mode, it will bias towards wider
| | 00:55 | apertures to blur up a background
behind your subject. In sports mode, it will
| | 00:59 | aim for faster motion-stopping shutter speeds.
| | 01:02 | Scene modes typically force you to
shoot JPEG files, and sometimes scene modes
| | 01:06 | will even add a little bit of image
processing to your images. For example,
| | 01:10 | your camera's portrait scene mode
might add a little bit of warming to your
| | 01:14 | images to make flesh tones look better.
| | 01:16 | After everything you have been through
in this course, you are most likely beyond
| | 01:19 | scene modes by now. You are probably used
to a finer degree of control. And if you
| | 01:23 | have started shooting RAW, then you'll
probably want to avoid scene modes, simply
| | 01:26 | because they force you to JPEG files.
| | 01:29 | If you are working with a small
point-and-shoot that lacks manual controls, then
| | 01:32 | scene modes are probably the
only manual overrides that you have.
| | 01:35 | And you probably got gobs of them.
| | 01:37 | You've probably got a scene mode for
shooting by candlelight, shooting at
| | 01:40 | dusk, shooting fireworks.
| | 01:42 | Check out your camera's manual to find
out exactly what these scene modes do.
| | 01:46 | No matter what you are shooting
with, if you are still not completely
| | 01:50 | comfortable with some of the concepts we
have been covering in this course, then
| | 01:53 | scene modes might be a nice crutch if
you find yourself having to shoot quickly
| | 01:56 | in a scene that your camera
provides a special mode for.
| | 01:59 | Now buried somewhere in you camera's
menu system you might also find some image-
| | 02:03 | processing controls of some kind.
| | 02:05 | These will be usually be sliders
for dialing in contrast, saturation,
| | 02:09 | sharpness. Or you might find a menu
of options for different looks for your
| | 02:14 | images: neutral, saturated, warm.
| | 02:17 | When you are shooting JPEG images,
these options give you some control over the
| | 02:20 | image processing that the
camera applies to the image.
| | 02:23 | Now these controls have no affect on
RAW images, and they actually have nothing
| | 02:27 | to do with exposure.
| | 02:28 | So if you see a slider that says
contrast, know that that setting in no way
| | 02:34 | alters your camera's light meter or
affects its shutter speed and aperture
| | 02:37 | choices; instead, that option tells
the camera to add more or less contrast
| | 02:41 | after the image has been taken.
| | 02:43 | It's just like increasing
contrast in your image editor.
| | 02:47 | On some cameras, you can use special
software on your computer to build image-
| | 02:50 | processing profiles that are extremely refined.
| | 02:53 | You can, for example, dial in
very subtle color and contrast edits.
| | 02:58 | These features are specially nice for
wedding shooters and other people who need
| | 03:01 | to quickly deliver huge numbers of
images, and so don't have time to do a lot of
| | 03:05 | image editing in their computer.
| | 03:07 | They can create an editing profile that
they know yields a look that they want
| | 03:11 | under the type of light that they
typically shoot in, and have their camera apply
| | 03:14 | that to every image they shoot.
| | 03:16 | If this sounds like something you could use, check
out your manual for details. But do understand,
| | 03:20 | again, these features do not
actually alter your exposure settings.
| | 03:25 | As you get more comfortable with
exposure and the manual modes on your camera,
| | 03:28 | you might very well find a place for
auto features in your day-to-day shooting.
| | 03:31 | There is no single correct way to
shoot, so the more tools you have in your
| | 03:36 | photo arsenal, the better off you will be.
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|
|
ConclusionShooting with post production in mind| 00:01 | While we usually divide the process of
making a photograph into shooting and
| | 00:05 | then post production, the fact is
you shouldn't think of these as two
| | 00:08 | separate unrelated subjects.
| | 00:10 | You should, in fact, always have
post production in mind while you're shooting.
| | 00:15 | This is not a practice that
unique to digital shooting.
| | 00:18 | Adams, Weston, Van Dyke, many of the
master film photographers of old were not
| | 00:23 | just great photographers;
| | 00:24 | they were incredible technicians.
| | 00:26 | They had in-depth understandings of
chemistry, paper, film, and they very
| | 00:31 | often devised and created
their own chemistries and paper.
| | 00:34 | When shooting, they often made exposure
decisions based on processing ideas that
| | 00:39 | they knew they could execute later.
| | 00:40 | They would expose one way with the idea
that they would process and print their
| | 00:44 | film using very specific techniques.
| | 00:46 | In other words, they were only able
to get successful images because they
| | 00:50 | were thinking about the entire
photographic process, shooting, and
| | 00:54 | postproduction, at the same time.
| | 00:56 | As a digital photographer, you need the same
broad perspective, and for a number of reasons.
| | 01:01 | Black and white is the most
obvious case of the time when you need to
| | 01:04 | pre-visualize post production.
| | 01:06 | For example, what had struck me in this
image was the statue against a darker background;
| | 01:12 | however, in the real world,
the background wasn't very dark.
| | 01:16 | I shot the image anyway, capturing as
much contrast as I could, because I knew
| | 01:19 | that I would be able to
process the image into this.
| | 01:22 | Here is another black-and-white example.
| | 01:25 | I saw the shaft of light in a shady alley,
and I knew that in black and white, it
| | 01:29 | could be an interesting play of
luminance. But I also knew that I needed a
| | 01:33 | subject so I waited for someone to
walk through, and then I took the shot.
| | 01:37 | After black-and-white conversion and
a little adjustment, I had the play of
| | 01:40 | light that I was thing of when I shot the image.
| | 01:44 | Here I had missed the really
spectacular part of this sunset, but when I
| | 01:47 | finally found a spot I could pull my
car over, I was struck by this field full
| | 01:51 | of tire tracks, and I knew that in
post production, I could play them up into
| | 01:55 | something more interesting.
| | 01:56 | There is something important to
notice about all of these examples.
| | 02:00 | I am not just thinking about
post production so that I can shoot in a particular way.
| | 02:04 | My post production ideas are actually
helping me to recognize subject matter.
| | 02:10 | As you saw with the statue image,
the image that I had in mind didn't
| | 02:13 | really exist at the scene.
| | 02:15 | What I recognized there was some raw
material, the potential for an image, that
| | 02:19 | I was only able to see because I knew
what I could do in post and how much I
| | 02:23 | could push my edits.
| | 02:25 | That said, note that I don't have a
perfect, finished visualization in my mind.
| | 02:30 | A lot of people you are supposed to be
able to see a black-and-white image in
| | 02:33 | your head, or view the world
with edits already in place.
| | 02:36 | That's very difficult to do, even with
lots of practice; instead, just work on
| | 02:40 | recognizing when a scene presents
raw material that can be worked into a
| | 02:44 | finished image later.
| | 02:46 | In the sunset image, I recognized that the
tire tracks would provide material that,
| | 02:50 | with a contrast adjustment, might turn
into something, even though I wasn't seeing
| | 02:55 | a specific image in my head.
| | 02:57 | Finally, there are times when you
won't actually know ahead of time what you
| | 03:00 | might want to do in your editor.
| | 03:02 | In this shot, I was simply struck by this tree.
| | 03:04 | It was out here in the middle of nowhere,
| | 03:06 | there was nothing around, and somehow
it had managed to grow quite large.
| | 03:10 | It was the middle of the day.
| | 03:11 | The light was dull, and I knew that a
tree out in the middle of nowhere wasn't
| | 03:14 | going to be an especially interesting
picture. And sure enough, the actually
| | 03:18 | shot is pretty boring.
| | 03:19 | But I took it on faith that I
would be able to figure out something to do
| | 03:23 | with that picture later. With some
cropping, some vignetting, some contrast
| | 03:26 | adjustment, and toning, I came up with this.
| | 03:29 | Now obviously, this whole practice
requires image-editing skills as well as
| | 03:33 | shooting technique, but developing the
skill begins when you are out shooting.
| | 03:37 | As you work with your image editor and
learn more about what it can do, start
| | 03:40 | thinking about those edits and how
they might affect the world around you as
| | 03:44 | you are shooting.
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| Exposure strategy | 00:00 | This is a Moreton Bay Fig
tree, and as you can see, this particular
| | 00:04 | specimen is spectacular.
| | 00:07 | It's got a really beautiful
big root system underneath.
| | 00:10 | It's got big, thick, gnarly branches.
| | 00:12 | And as a photographer, as you are
walking up to it, you are not probably
| | 00:17 | thinking, "Wow, look at that beautiful tree."
| | 00:18 | You have done that already.
| | 00:19 | That's why you are walking
up to it in the first place.
| | 00:21 | After you've identified it as a
subject, and you are walking up to begin
| | 00:24 | shooting, what you should be thinking is,
"What potential exposure problems are am
| | 00:28 | I going to have here?"
| | 00:29 | And it should be kind of obvious what
they are, right off the bat, the biggest
| | 00:32 | one is going to be backlighting.
| | 00:33 | I have got all this sky back here
that's going to potentially mess up my shot.
| | 00:37 | If I am going to be shooting
underneath the tree, I've got the problem of
| | 00:40 | standing in shade with all
that bright stuff out behind.
| | 00:43 | What I need is an exposure strategy before I
even press the shutter button the first time.
| | 00:49 | We have been looking at a lot of theory
in this course, a lot of exposure theory.
| | 00:52 | We have been studying a lot of individual
parameters and seeing how they work together.
| | 00:56 | We have been doing a lot of that study
in the studio in a somewhat controlled,
| | 00:59 | laboratory-type situation.
| | 01:02 | That stuff, all of that theory,
that doesn't in stay in the studio.
| | 01:04 | It's got to come with you
when you go out shooting.
| | 01:07 | And the way that it should kind of
manifest at first is anytime that you come
| | 01:11 | into a new situation, you need to
quickly identify what might cause you an
| | 01:16 | exposure problem and build a
strategy before you begin shooting anything.
| | 01:20 | So let's think about this one.
| | 01:22 | Again, backlighting is going to be my problem.
| | 01:24 | We've looked at lots of different
ways of controlling backlighting.
| | 01:26 | What might be the best one in this situation?
| | 01:28 | Well that's going to
depend on what I am shooting.
| | 01:29 | We have looked at shutter speed, ISO,
aperture, exposure compensation, concepts
| | 01:35 | of over- and underexposing.
| | 01:36 | We've looked at program shift.
| | 01:38 | It is the very, very, very rare
situation that requires you to manipulate all of
| | 01:43 | these parameters at once.
| | 01:44 | Usually there is just one parameter that
you are going to need to be looking at.
| | 01:47 | In this case, let's say that we are
shooting a portrait underneath the tree, so I
| | 01:51 | know that I am going to
want shallow depth of field.
| | 01:53 | So I'm going to be most concerned with aperture.
| | 01:55 | But if I am underneath that tree, I
know also that it's going to be very
| | 01:58 | bright in the background,
| | 01:59 | so I'm probably going to
want to overexpose a little bit.
| | 02:01 | So I'm going to be thinking about
aperture and some overexposure, and
| | 02:04 | that's probably it.
| | 02:06 | If it turns out that my overexposure
drives my shutter speed down, then I'm going
| | 02:09 | to need to think about ISO.
| | 02:11 | I need to have all that in
my head before I go in there.
| | 02:13 | Obviously, once I start
shooting, that may change.
| | 02:16 | It's always true with your exposure
strategy. It's a fluctuating thing, as
| | 02:19 | situations change, as your
understanding of the situation changes.
| | 02:23 | Let's say I am shooting some people
running around the tree or running around
| | 02:26 | underneath the tree.
| | 02:27 | That's going to be about shutter speed.
| | 02:28 | So I'm going to dial in to shutter
priority mode and be ready to try and think
| | 02:32 | about stopping and blurring motion.
| | 02:34 | Again, ISO may come into play to
keep my shutter speed where I want it.
| | 02:39 | This is what happens anytime I
enter a new shooting situation.
| | 02:43 | I think about where the potential
exposure weak spots are, and I begin
| | 02:47 | to develop a strategy.
| | 02:48 | When you are first starting out, that
strategic planning section maybe something
| | 02:52 | that you actually have to stop and stand
here for a minute and think it through.
| | 02:55 | Okay, big aperture, shallow depth of field.
| | 02:58 | You may have to work through all of that stuff.
| | 02:59 | As you get better, you may not even
be aware that you are strategizing.
| | 03:03 | You will simply go into a situation
and find yourself turning to a particular
| | 03:06 | mode, preparing a particular
type of over- or underexposure.
| | 03:09 | It gets easier as you go along.
| | 03:10 | The important thing is it's
a step that has to happen.
| | 03:13 | Throw your camera into program mode.
| | 03:15 | You can shoot snapshots all day
long and get pretty good results.
| | 03:19 | There is a good chance in that mode
though that you're going to come home with
| | 03:21 | people that are too dark because they
are in shadow or things that are blurry
| | 03:24 | because you didn't have a good shutter speed.
| | 03:26 | If you're really dead-set on getting
keeper images, then you've got to strategize.
| | 03:31 | If you're still not clear on any of
the individual exposure parameters we've
| | 03:35 | covered, or any of the concepts we have
covered, go watch those sections again,
| | 03:38 | go out and practice some more.
| | 03:40 | What you are after now is putting all
of those things together into a cohesive
| | 03:43 | strategy, and learning how to adapt and
adjust that strategy every time you come
| | 03:48 | into a new shooting situation.
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| Goodbye| 00:00 | This is supposed to be the goodbye
movie, the last movie, but I am going to
| | 00:03 | sneak this in one more time:
shutter speed, aperture, ISO;
| | 00:06 | that's all exposure is.
| | 00:07 | You've seen a lot of
different ways of controlling them.
| | 00:09 | You've seen what they do.
| | 00:10 | You've seen how to manipulate them.
| | 00:12 | You should have a good
foundation for exposure right now.
| | 00:15 | So what do you do next?
| | 00:17 | Lenses would be a great place to go
next, where you're going to learn about some
| | 00:20 | particulars about your lens
and some composition stuff.
| | 00:22 | The most important thing to
do next though is practice.
| | 00:26 | All this study is great.
| | 00:27 | Nothing will make you a
better photographer than shooting.
| | 00:29 | So get out, get out in the good light, early
morning, late afternoon, get out anytime you
| | 00:33 | can and just start shooting.
| | 00:35 | All of this will get much easier,
and you will understand much more as
| | 00:38 | you go.
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