Basic photography: metering modes

It’s been a long time since the last time I write about basic photography. I just stumbled upon a great article on explaining metering modes. I’ll just copy paste it from DPS because I think there’s just no need to rewrite the whole thing. It’s already basic enough.

Credits to the original author. Here goes.

On today’s digital cameras, users have the ability to choose and adjust the metering mode, or how the camera measures the brightness of the subject. Metering settings work by assessing the amount of light available for a photograph, and then adjusting the exposure accordingly. Sometimes, however, the camera isn’t intuitive enough to get the exposure right when using Program, Shutter Priority, or Aperture Priority modes. Fortunately, the photographer has the ability to make manual adjustments to the metering mode used by the camera. (Refer to your individual owner’s manual to learn how to change the settings on your camera.)

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Basic photography: understanding histograms

Every DSLR has a display feature called histograms. It looks like a graph with random data that any new photographer don’t know what it actually is. And maybe, won’t even care. Here’s a peek, it’s a reader that records how much light (how bright or dark) a picture is .

You should know that every LCD screen – camera, TV, or digital frame – could display different brightness level of a particular picture. What you see bright in this screen might not the the same in that screen.

This is why histogram comes in. It is the standard reader to record how bright a pic. A sample, you had an underexposed pic. So this should looks quite dark as shown in histogram. Now in your camera, it looks dark as expected, but it is quite bright in your computer screen. Chances are, your computer screen are set a little brighter than normal.

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Basic photography: understanding white balance

Another series of basic photography from Darren Rowse of DPS.

White Balance is an aspect of photography that many digital camera owners don’t understand or use – but it’s something well worth learning about as it can have a real impact upon the shots you take.

So for those of you who have been avoiding White Balance – let me introduce you to it. I promise to keep it as simple as possible and keep what follows as usable as I can:

At its simplest – the reason we adjust white balance is to get the colors in your images as accurate as possible.

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Rule of thirds

Here’s the 4th installment of my basic photography series. Everyone who started out drawing or photography must have at least heard ‘rule of thirds’. So  to show you what it is, I share this great article from DPS.

Perhaps the most well know principle of photographic composition is the ‘Rule of Thirds‘.

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Basic photography: understanding ISO

Here goes the third post of my basic photography series. This is ISO setting, so here goes the basic definition.

In traditional (film) photography ISO (or ASA) was the indication of how sensitive a film was to light. It was measured in numbers (you’ve probably seen them on films – 100, 200, 400, 800 etc). The lower the number the lower the sensitivity of the film and the finer the grain in the shots you’re taking.

In Digital Photography ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. Higher ISO settings are generally used in darker situations to get faster shutter speeds (for example an indoor sports event when you want to freeze the action in lower light) – however the cost is noisier shots. I’ll illustrate this below with two elargements of shots that I just took – the one on the left is taken at 100 ISO and the one of the right at 3200 ISO (click to enlarge to see the full effect).

Image credit of DPS. Click to see larger image.

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