Photography 101: ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture

Ariana Zahedi Photography

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If you’re here reading this article, it means you’re interested in learning more about photography – yay!!! I hope you were able to catch last month’s issue on beginner photography equipment. If not, definitely check it out before proceeding!

Now that you know about what camera body and lenses to start out with, we’re going to dive into the settings of a camera – more specifically: ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture settings. While it’s quite convenient to utilize the automatic setting where each attribute is arranged by the camera itself, photographers have leaned towards manual settings in order to achieve their vision based on their surrounding environment. With photography, lighting is key which means it’s significant to understand how you can manipulate it for your photos. There are many tools a photographer can use to adjust light apart from the camera as well, but for now let’s pay attention to the precious little gift that makes your memories come to life.

Before scrolling down to read about the settings, follow these steps first so that you are prepared to do some hands-on learning:

1. Have your camera in front of you and turn it on

2. Change the camera setting to manual (“M” on the dial)

3. Find the Live View button on your camera in order to see effects live from the exercises you’ll be doing.

ISO

International Organization for Standardization…. seems intimidating to read and understand at first, right? It is basically a set of standards for various forms of measurements – in this case, we are measuring the camera’s sensitivity to light. 

The ISO setting has the smoothest way of understanding and adjusting – the higher the ISO, the more light you are pulling into the camera. If you have set your camera to Manual, you should see many different icons and abbreviations on your screen (each camera is different, so be sure to look in the manual or online if you are having difficulty locating the setting). Once you locate the ISO setting on your screen, click on it – you should see a line with numbers starting at 100 going up (100, 200, 400, etc.). 

Try this Exercise:

1. Go outside and take note of the lighting. Is it sunny? Is it cloudy?

2. Set your camera to Manual

3. Set your ISO to 100

4. Take a picture and view the photo to process how the lighting looks.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 while increasing the ISO each time and view the differences between each photo.

*After performing all of the previous steps, try this exercise again in different settings (outdoor and sunny, outdoor and cloudy, indoor near light, indoor far from light, nighttime, etc.) and take note of how it effects your photos. This will help you to understand how light changes and how you can adjust for those changes.

If you’ve deciphered the works of ISO from this exercise, you see that the more light there is in your environment, the smaller your ISO should be. On a sunny day outside, there is so much light that your camera does not need to increase its sensitivity towards it. Vice versa, the darker your environment, the more light sensitivity is needed and therefore, the higher your ISO should be.

Quick Tip: when shooting in darker/night settings, it’s best to use a flash with lower ISO. It is incredible that cameras can go to 25600 ISO and beyond because that is a lot of light to pull, however there is a cost to using extremely high ISO. Normally, when ISO is over 800, the photo will begin to grain and blur. This is because the camera is attempting to take in so much light that it becomes unnatural and the camera cannot process the image it fully. This will also lead to some discoloration. When using a flash, you are adding light to the outside environment, supporting the camera to capture a clearer image without processing more information than it should.

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Shutter Speed

Similar to ISO, shutter speed works with light, only in frames. The larger your shutter speed (fraction closest to 1.0), the longer it takes to capture the photo, which means its capturing as much light in that time frame as possible. Larger shutter speeds will typically result in a bright white image with blur if you are shooting in the daytime. You may be asking what positive aspect can come out of that? Well, larger shutter speeds are actually perfect for when you want to take night sky photos that capture the stars and milky way.

On the other end, the smaller your shutter speed, the shortest amount of time it takes to capture the photo, which means it does not have much time to capture all of the light. The highest shutter speed can result in an extremely dark photo, however smaller shutter speeds are perfect for fast moving objects like racecars and hummingbirds.

A happy medium that I use on an outside-sunny-day setting falls within 100 ISO and 1/125 or 1/200 shutter speed. Like partners, they both work together to make photos look and feel natural. I typically adjust my shutter speed first for sharpness then move to ISO if I need more or less light added in. If you use a larger your shutter speed, you can decrease your ISO and vice versa, smaller shutter speed with larger ISO.

Shutter Speed Image Chart:

Try this exercise: do the same exercise you did for ISO, but now test and adjust the shutter speed. Then try it with both ISO and shutter speed!

Aperature

Now that you have comprehended how to employ ISO and shutter speed into your photography, let’s focus on another major lighting technique: Aperture. Not only does the aperture impact light for your photo, it can also determine how much you would like to focus on in a photo. This is an attribute that can also heavily influence the price tag on a lens.

The aperture, or “F-stop”, focuses on the depth and lighting of a photo. More common lenses used by beginners or for anything landscape use a larger aperture range (between 3.5 and 22). The larger the aperture, the more focus you have on the entire photo. This in turn darkens the photo with a shallow depth of field. Our cell phones mostly shoot on a larger aperture in regular shooting mode.

When it comes to portraits, this is where we see the bokeh effect, as mentioned in the last article. It can also call for a rise in the price tag, so be sure to do a double take before purchasing. They are highly sought-after lenses due to the production of a sharp and dreamy nature. The smaller the aperture, the more focus you have on one subject within a photo. This in turn lightens the photo with a deeper depth of field. This can also be compared to the portrait mode on an Apple iPhone.

Shot on F/1.4, Ariana Zahedi Photo

Shot on iPhone at F/16 on Wide Lens Mode, Ariana Zahedi Photo

If you want to learn more about new terms, separate lenses, accessories, aesthetics, and more, be sure to follow Mind Body Soul Sisterz blog update! If you have any questions, please feel free to email me directly at arianazahediphotography@gmail.com :)

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