Modes and the Exposure Triangle - Revisited

Modes and the exposure triangle revisited:

I spoke about this subject some time ago and I had a very positive reaction to it. So, I thought it was worth a revisit!

If you don’t understand the exposure triangle, your results will be limited and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to shoot the kind of photographs you would like to. I say this with some conviction as one of the most common questions I am asked is ‘How can I get a sharp subject and an out-of-focus background?’.

Simply put, once you understand the exposure triangle, the full creative capability of you and your camera can be realised. Without that understanding, you’re likely to be stuck on ‘Auto’.

The exposure triangle is the relationship between shutter speed, aperture and ISO (sensitivity). To some people, it looks quite complicated at first. But, especially if you drive a car, you are already, instinctively, dealing with a similar relationship.

Modes take advantage of the automation offered by today's cameras. They relate to the exposure triangle and allow the camera to do some of the heavy lifting for you, freeing you to indulge in your creativity and produce great results.

If you are struggling with the exposure triangle (or any other aspect of photography), check out my course: Discovering DSLR and Mirrorless Photography. 

I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Graham

It's time for another podcast...

Transcript

>> Speaker A: 0:18

Today I'm going to talk about a subject that I have covered before in another podcast, but it was a while ago and that is the exposure triangle. And I'm also going to mention modes in the camera. So, as I've said, I've covered this before, but I think it's one of the most important things to understand when it comes to getting the most from your dslr, your mirrorless camera, whatever you're using, where you have control over, each element of the exposure triangle. And it's one of those things that I think some people shy away from and the reason they do that is there are a lot of numbers and it can look quite daunting if you just look at the numbers. So what I'm going to use, and if you've heard me speak about this before, I'm going to use the same example that I've used before. but it's just like driving a car. If you drive a car, when you think about it, there areual sorts of relationships that you could think, about that you have to know. the one I'm going to talk about is what happens when you put down on the throttle, on the gas, on the accelerator, if you're listing in the uk. So what happens is you put your foot down, more fuel goes into the engine if it's, a petrol or a diesel car, I'm excluding electric vehicles at this point. And then what also happens is you change your range. So what I mean by that is how far you can go on the fuel that you currently have in your vehicle. So that's relationship. And I'm sure none of that came as any particular surprise to you. and that's all we're really looking at with the exposure triangle. But we can start to complicate it a bit because when we look at the example of the vehicle, of the car, you have pressure on the throttle, the accelerator, the gas pedal, whatever you want to call it. And you might measure that, in pounds or newtons or whatever it might be, but I'm pretty sure most people listening anyway won't have any idea what that number is, and I certainly don't when I drive my car. the other things I've said is when you put your foot down, you have more fuel going into the engine. So if we think of the flow rate, let's say that's in liters per second and I'm just grabbing, a way of measuring it out of the air, but there'll be some sort of way you can measure the quantity of fuel that's going in over a certain time. So whether it's liters per second or something else doesn't really matter. But that number obviously will change as you put more fuel into the engine, into carburetor, whatever you've got FUE injection system. And that number changes. Now, again, I'm guessing that most people won't have the first clue about what those numbers are, and I certainly don't when it comes to my car. The number that I hope you're familiar with is the speed youe going. Because if youre not familiar with that, that can cause a bit of distress and also some fines. So you probably know whether its miles per hour or kilometers per hour, whatever it is. Butll youll see this changing speed, youve got a speedo there. Itll tell you how you're going. And you can see immediately, the change that putting your foot down has. So, and as I've said, that also impacts your range. So the other factor there, in fact'now added a fourth factor, to what I was talking about. but the other factor is how far can you go if you keep your foot in the same place Now, So if you're driving on a motorway, a freeway, an auto route, whatever you're driving on, and you just keep your foot in that position, how far can you go before you run out of fuel? ###al and that distance will be less than it will be when you had less pressure on the pedals. So that's another variable that you probably would have some idea about whether it's 50, miles, 100 miles, 100Ks s, whatever it might be. So I hope you getting the idea of this though the point is that you understand all of this stuff pretty instinctively, but you dont actually need to know what the numbers are. And this is the point I really try to get across when it comes to the exposure triangle because the variables there are fixed. You have your exc. Your shutter speed, you have your aperture and you have your sensitivities. So you've got shutter speed in, what fraction of a second that the shutter is open. Might be 1,000th of a second, 100th. It might be several seconds. If you're doing a long exposure, you've got the aperture. And I'm not even going to talk about where the numbers come from. now, as you know, I do, or I hope you know, I do an online photography course, it starts assuming that you know absolutely nothing and it works up from there. So in that course I go through this in a lot more detail. I also break this down much more and I'GIVE you specific exercises you can do so that you can really understand what every aspect of the triangle is doing for you and how you can start to make use of it. And the reason that I do that and the reason that I'm doing this podcast, on this particular subject is that I believe this is probably the most important aspect of photography that you can learn. And the reason I say that is that if you know it, you open up the full creative potential of your camera, of your imagination, and you can start creating amazing results. If you don't know it, you're always in auto, you will not be able to get out, you'll never be able to get the results you want, or it'll be hit and miss. You're going to struggle. If you look at other people's work, maybe other photographers that you want to produce, the same kind of results, you're going to struggle to understand what it is they did. If you don't understand this, and it's a bit like driving a car and not being able to, whether it's an auto or a stick shift or whatever, but you kind're just getting from a to be, you're not having any fun with it particularly. So, as I've said, you've got the three variables. You've got shutter speed, you've got aperture, which is how wide the hole is. If you like, the light is coming through in the lens. Your lens, includes elements inside and they will open or close a bit like the iris of your eye. when you're in bright light, your iris will close down to restrict the amount of light coming in. And when you're in a low light environment or at night, your iris will open up. So that's exactly what's going on in the lens on your camera. You've fact got an iris there. Ah, obviously the implementation is slightly different to your eye, but it amounts to the same thing. When it's open, you have a lot of light coming in and when it's closed down, you have a lot less light coming in. But there is another element that influences your results. And then the final thing is ISO. So I mentioned that that's the sensitivity of the sensor in your camera if you're using a digital camera or if you're using film. And that does seem to be ve making a bit of a comeback. And this is also relevant actually. If you're switching from digital to film, if you don't understand this relationship, you'll probably struggle a little bit more. So it's the sensitivity to light of the film, and that's measured in ISO. And basically the bigger the number, the more sensitive the film or the sensor is to light. So for example, if you had an ISO 100 that's not particularly sensitive, you would tend to use that kind of, a setting in good lighting conditions where it's quite bright light. And if you're using an ISO of 8,000, really, sensitive, you would tend to use that in very low light situations. Now what I've said is correct as far as it goes, but there's actually a bit more to it than that. And that's what I really want to briefly cover in this podcast. But I do really urge you to make sure you understand it. And the best way to understand it is to go out and vary these settings and see what the effect is. And that's one of the exercises in the course that I have. So it takes you through step by step with each one of them and gives you practical exercises so that you can really go beyond a, kind of theoretical understanding of it to just knowing it. And it's like driving a car. You can probably, before you learn to drive, you might have had a theoretical knowledge of how you drove the car, but you didn't really learn how to drive a car until you started doing it. And driving a car is all about getting out there, practicing, making mistakes, getting better at it and that kind of thing. That's exactly what we do in photography. So just to dive in slightly deeper on each of those elements. So shutter speed, the measure I give or just the suggestion I give is shutter speed. You want to vary for one of two things. Either it's to compensate for either low light or a lot of light. So remember, what this exposure triangle is trying to give you is a correctly exposed image. That's what we're going for here. And when you're in auto mode, the camera will decide based on how it's been calibrated what a good exposure looks like, and it will set, those things up for you. Normally, you'll have a default ISO setting. if you're using film, you have to actually tell the camera what ISO you've got. On the older ones, I think some of the later film cameras could read it off the film. none of the ones I use could do that, but, some could do that, but the Bottom line is if you're using film you probably need to tell the camera what you've got. And if you're using ara a digital camera then the camera will just have default settings that it will run with and it will then vary things as it needs to. Generally it will be shutter speed and aperture if it has control over aperture, ah, to get a correct exposure for you. So again these are variables. How does it work? Well with shutter speed as have said your going to be varying that for one of two things. One is the amount of light you've got and the other thing is how much movement you want in the photograph. So for example shooting wildlife, if I'm photographing hun that wh breaching I'm in a situation where the animal is moving. I'm on a boat that's probably moving. I'm probably moving because generally with breeces unless you're very lucky or you have a good view of where the animal's coming up, you can't see where it's about to come out. So it all happens very quickly. So I want a very far shutter to speed because my aim in that situation is to absolutely freeze that moment. Just freeze that moment in time. Freeze it to the point where you can see individual water droplets coming off the whale. So given that everything is moving, I'm talking about thousandths of a second. That's the kind of shutter speed I want. However there might be other situations where I've got action going on but I want some movement in it. And that might be sports photography. I used to do it a lot when I was photograph, I did some photographing of racing cars. I've also done it with aplanes, particularly propeller driven aplanes. And my go to shutter speed there was 1 125th of a second. So we're now talking hundredths of a second. And you can kind of pick what you need in there. But what I would be doing would be panning with either the aircraft or the car and trying to keep the subject. So the aircraft or the car, it might have be the driver in exactly the same spot in the viewfinder as I'm panning. As I'm turning and I'm using the motor drive, I'm shooting away but at that shutter speed because things like wheels or propellers are going to be moving pretty fast. You're going to get blurring and you're probably going to get blurring of the background as well. So all of that if you get it right, if everything comes together, you've got a pin sharp driver or pilot, or even the vehicle they're in is pin sharp. But you've got movement behind. You've got a blurry background, you've got wheels, maybe blurred, or you've got a propeller disc. so if that's your priority, if it's about getting movement in the image, then shutter speed is most important to you. So that's going to drive the other settings. And obviously there's a bit more to it than that. But for the purposes of this, just to give you a brief introduction, this is how it works. Aperture is the next thing to think about. And as I've said, that works like an iris. So again, just like shutter speed, you may determine your aperture based on the amount of light you have. So basically, if you've got, a lot of light, you might want to stop down or make the iris really small. So you'd have a number like an F22, or if there's not much light, you probably want to open it up as much as you can. And that will depend on the lens. It might be F, something like F 5.6, or it might be F 2.8. So basically, the smaller that number is after the F, the bigger, the aperture. Basically, the bigger the hole in the lens, if you like, the more light can come through. But just like with shutter speed, it's not a single, variable there. You've got another thing that is directly impacted by aperture, and that's how much of the photograph is in focus. And that focus area is determined by two things, your aperture and then the distance that your subject is from you. Or to be more precise, from the, sensor in the camera or the film plane. And you might, depending on what camera you've got, you might even see a mark, on the top of your camera, just a line. Ah, sometimes it might be a little circular symbol with it, something like that that actually shows the plane of, the film or the sensor of where that is. Because for some types of photography, you need to make a pretty exact measurement and focus really precisely. So that focal distance to how far away your subject is from the camera is one factor. And then what the aperture will do, your aperture setting will allow a certain amount of what's in front of the subject and a certain amount of what's behind the subject being in focus. And basically the way it works is that if you're using a number like F22, so you might remember that the iris is really small, so there's not a lot of light coming in. So maybe bright light. With that kind of a setting, pretty much everything that you can see will be in focus. So most of what's in front of your subject will be in focus. And probably pretty much everything that's behind will be in focus as well. If, on the other hand, you open that iris up, if you open the lens up and you're using something like F 5.6, what will happen then is that although you've got more light coming in, there'll be a much shorter distance in front of your subject that's in focus and a much shorter distance behind the subject that's in focus. So by understanding that and knowing how the aperture works in your lenses, that your lens and cameras set up, you can create these shots where you've got a very sharp subject, but the foreground and the background are out of focus. So if you look at my work, particularly with land animals, you'll find that a lot of them are shot that way. And I'CONTROL that by using aperture as my primary, setting. So when I'm doing that kind of photography, what's in focus is the thing that's most important to me. So that's M2 elements. Then the final thing is, and as I've said, that determines just how sensitive to light either your film or your sensor is. And I've already explained that. So the way these things work is that. And you need to practice this because I honestly, people like me, so I'm not very good at, imagining how stuff like this works. I've got to see it. I'm much better at learning by seeing things and I learn even more by actually doing it. So this is why I recommend, if you don't understand this, just getting on, doing a course somewhere, whether it's mine or somebody else's, but somewhere where you get guidance and exercises, you can get guided through, where you really get this, you go through each element in turn and you start to understand it. So as I've said, the key thing is to get the correct exposure. So you can do this fully manually. And if you're using a manual camera, you have to think about this stuff all the time anyway, because you have to manually make all of your settings, your ISO, your shutter speed and your aperture. However, if you go to, most modern cameras, I'm going to say mo, because there might be an exception, but it's probably all of them. You will have what we call modes. And I'VE already talked about one mode and if you've not really experimented with this, there's one mode you're probably using at the moment and that's auto, that's the green one. Usually you'll have a little dial or a menu somewhere and one of the options will be auto. And then the other options that you see will include but not necessarily be limited to, some form of shutter speed priority. Might. So in a Canon, you'll actually see that as tv. It's time, variable time variance. you might have aperture in some forms. So again on a Canon it's av. So aperture variable variance. you will also have fully manual, so just an M. And you're also likely to have B. And B stands for bulb. So as I said, you might have others. but the ones that I'm really interested in here, if you want to really learn it, the thing to do is go to manual and really get good at it. But I'd say if you're not familiar with this stuff and you've only ever used auto, just use one at a time and as I say, go through guided exercise. Because if you go straight into manual, you've got to think of everything and in my opinion it's probably a bit much, at least to start with. But graduate up to using manual and just setting everything yourself once you understand it and you understand how it works on the particular system you're using. The, settings I use, so these are the modes basically. And the idea of the modes is that modern cameras are pretty smart. You've got a pretty nifty computer in there and it can do an awful lot of the heavy lifting for you. So and that's essentially what it's doing when you're in auto. It's just deciding everything. The problem is when you're in auto, you've kind of given up your creative control to the camera and the camera doesn't really know what you want the result. So if you are in a situation where you do want a subject that's sharp and the foreground and background out of focus, especially the background, the chances are in auto you're not likely to get that. camera is likely to set you with an aperture because remember that's controlling depth field. That has a lot of things in focus, maybe everything in focus because it doesn't know what you're trying to achieve. And the same with shutter speed, it will look for a balance somewhere between probably a mid range aperture setting because for certainly cheaper lenses they tend to perform a Little bit better in the central kind of settings. So that's likely to be F8 or F11. Now I will say as an aside, I'm throwing these numbers out. You don't have to remember them because what will happen is as you start to exercise, do these exercises with the camera, certain numbers are going to become familiar to you. And I've done another podcast on buying a lens and I also talk about what those lens mean. Sorry, what those numbers mean, because you'll see them on the lens. So don't worry too much about those. Right now the thing is to just stick the dial somewhere in the middle. If you've got a dial on your lens where you set the aperture or it might be that you rotate, a switch somewhere on the camera body and it's handled that way. So that's how they're the three things you need to think about. And I briefly touched on the modes and one of the fallacies that I've heard peopleul talk about is that professional photographers only ever operate in manual. Well, I don't know many who do. if you are using manual, you're probably in a studio because you've got lots of time to get setups and then measure how far away you are from your subject if that's what you want to do, all that kind of stuff. And you've probably got a lighting set up that gives you very predictable lighting results. You're not having to deal necessarily or certain in studio, you're not having to deal with clouds covering the sun and then going away again or driving between trees on a bright day where you've got a very strong distinction between bright light areas where the sun comes through and then very dark areas where you've got shades. So if you've been taking photographs for a while, or if you're planning to take photographs, obviously these are variables that you have to deal with when you're taking your photographs. So it's not just making one setting normally on a particular day, if you're out photographing on a day where the sun's changing, as in clouds coming over and disappearing again, or you're at a time of day where the light level is changing. So typically that, just after dawn and just before dusk, those are times when you've really got to keep a. Making adjustments for the amount of light that is on your subject when you take the shot. So I'm not trying to put you off here, but these are realities of it. And also this is why it's so it's so important, in my opinion, to really understand this relationship. And you do that by practice. So I'm just conscious the more I talk about it, the more complicated it starts to sound, but it really isn't. So the key thing is to just understand what each of those parts of the triangle do, what each side does. the next thing is to understand on the camera there's something that'help you. So when I'm shooting, I normally, when I'm photographing land animals, because I'm more interested in depth of field, I will use av. so aperture is my priority. It's an aperture priority setting. And I've already set my ISO. I do that manually on my cameras. So what the camera will do is just change the shutter speed to make sure that I can get a good exposure with the aperture setting that I've chosen. And that's the key thing. So my creative control when I'm shooting that image is the depth of field. In other words, what's in focus in that frame and what isn't. And that's quite deliberate because if you've heard me talk about, just how you compose composition of an image, depth of field is one of the important elements of it. So once you understand and you can use depth of field, it does open up a lot of creative potential for you. occasionally. so it would be situations like the, humpback whale that I spoke about. When it's breaching, I'll actually switch so that I've got shutter speed priority because I want to specifically shoot in thousandths of a second. Because what I'm aiming to do when I shoot an animal like that is to just absolutely freeze the action. And in that situation, the other thing to consider is I'm out at sea. I might have nothing in the background, or I might have cliffs in the background, things like that. But the chances are, that the aperture, the depth of field, so my aperture setting is less important from a depth of field perspective than it is from getting the correct exposure. So maybe opening up the aperture so that I can sit with that very fast shutter speed. Because obviously the faster your shutter speed, the more ambient light you need. otherwise you're having to open up the aperture just to compensate for lack of light. So in other words, you're much more likely to be able to use a very high shutter speed where you have bright light on a bright summer's day. Then, if you're at dusk, then you're going to struggle because you've got to really push up your ISO. Now the thing I haven't really spoken about is ISO. There's likely to be a program mode, something like that on your camera. where you would control it. Usually with ISO. What does it matter where your ISO is set to? it could be 100, it could be 4,000, it could be anything. It could be either side of that or somewhere in the middle. Why does it really matter? Well, the thing you have to remember is that when you are using a high ISO, so when you're in the hundreds and thousands, as you move up in that direction, what happens is the sensor or the film is more sensitive. And what I'm going to talk about actually applies more to digital cameras. So if you're using a DSLR or mirrorless camera, as you push that ISO up, what happens is y, the sensor gets more sensitive, but it will also begin to pick up, we'll call it noise. And it gets picked up by heat from the sensor itself and the heat that's generated within the camera. Now this isn't the kind of heat that's going to warm you up on a cold day, but because we're talking about very sensitive electronics here, it is the kind of levels of heat that as you push the ISO up, as you push the sensitivity of the sensor up, it will begin to appear in the image. And how it appears is like little pixels, little squares in the picture and lots of them. And where you're likely to notice them much more is when you have a single color. So let's say you're photographing the sky and let's say it's blue just for the sake of argument and you've pushed your is out really high so you can get a very, very far shutter speed. What you like to see in that sky, because let's say it's a uniform blue, is a lot of little dots. They're very, very small, but they're going to be there. And that's noise basically that's generated within the camera. So the golden rule when it comes to using ISO, if you don't want the noise, and obviously noise might be something that you want, this is about creating images that that float your boat. And you might like really noisey images, but if you don't, the trick there is to just keep the ISO as low as you can get away with because that reduces the amount of noise in the image. And it's the same with film. So if you are using film, if you have a slow ISO, so something like ISO 100 is a very good general purpose film. even ISO 400 is getting a bit fast. If you want to do a really high res sharp image, you might Even consider an ISO 64 or an ISO 50 or even an ISO 25 depending on what light you've got. And if you think of just going back to film days but magazine images, that first of all, magazine front covers particularly would tend to be shot on a medium format camera. And the benefit of that is gives you really big negatives. So the enlargement you have to do from the size of negative up to the printed image is smaller than if you're going from 35 mil. But that would typically be shot on a very low ISO rated film because that gives you very sharp, very high resolution. On the other hand, and I've done this deliberately, I've gone up with very fast films up in I think like 2000s, that sort of speed. These are quite specialist films and they give you a really grainy result. And this is the whole point of it. If you like grainy images then knock yourself out. But this is how you get them. So coming back to understanding this stuff, this is really the point of it. It's understanding how you get certain results by setting your camera. And most of those settings, not all of them, but most of them are likely to revolve around understanding the exposure triangle. So understanding the function of shutter speed, aperture, ISO and how they work together so that you can produce a result that gives you perhaps the amount of blur in it that you want, the amount of grain in it that you want, and that you can actually see the image because there's enough light reaching theer of the film. And as I've said the benefit that we have these days with modern cameras is with the modes. And this also TR on film cameras actually to an extent. But I think on digital it's far more the case now because there's a much higher level of control generally on modern cameras than you had in old film cameras. but you've got these modes that you can choose from. So once you understand it, first of all learn the exposure triangle, understand the basics and then go back to the modes and experiment with them so that you can see exactly what the camera's doing. But this is really fundamental because if you want to shoot wildlife especially or sport or some sort of adventure activity, the chances are you are going to want to get a bit creative. You're not going to want to shoot in auto. But before you can switch auto off and select a different mode, you've really got to understand what it's doing. So look, I hope that's been helpful. I hope that shed a little bit of light and I hope I'm completely baffled you now. As I'SAID at the start, what I absolutely recommend is that you do some training. This I think is the best way of doing it. find someone who can explain it to you in a way that you can understand. That's really important. you're welcome, as I say, to sign up for my course. I think it's understandable. And I think the most important thing though is to have guided exercises that you can go through that take you through each aspect of the exposure triangle so you can do it. You can see the difference when you change settings. So you can begin to predict what's going to happen when your change a setting, when you're shooting for real, when you're in a, whether it's shooting mildlife or on a holale or whatever you're doing. So that is it on the exposure triangular modes. I hope that's been useful and hopefully that's given you some insights. Awesome clarity. And I'll speak to you on the next podcast. Bye for now. Well, we're getting close to the end of another year, so 2024 is starting to come to an end as I record this. So I hope it's been a good year for you and I hope you get a bit of a break over the coming weeks. Maybe have a cool yul or whatever it is you celebrate, if you celebrate. I particularly just wanted to record this to thank everybody for their support. the podcast is really growing and obviously that's down to people listening and hopefully sharing. so I do thank you for that. I particularly want to thank my Patreon supporters because they contribute to what I'm doing financially, which is great because that helps me to keep going. And if you haven't contributed or if you're thinking about it, don't be shy, that you can. It doesn't have to be a permanent subscript. You can also just buy me a coffee if you've enjoyed the podcast. But everything is appreciated. And I also wanted to remind you that the 2025 calendar, My Wildlife, calendar is still available so you can order those online on the website. so if you go to www.ge.photography, you'll find the calendars there. so whether they're you or if you just want to give one to somebody as a present. I think calendars are a pretty good present to go for. Of course there's also the fine art, prints and my online training courses. Now if you are serious about photography and you're not ready to commit to a course and I am giving 100% money back guarantee on those as well so I'm taking all of the risk on the courses. but there's also challenges you can do for free like the 14 day challenge that's there. There's also a PDF you can download that gives you 10 tips to just help your photography. So whatever you're doing over the next few weeks I hope you enjoy it. And I'll be looking ah, at my plans for 2025 which at this stage I'm hoping to get to Zimbabwe. So I'll keep you informed on that. But whatever you do, I hope you have a great time and thanks again for your support throughout 2024. So bye for now.