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Cameras and the images they capture have never been more
accessible, portable or easier to share.
Within hours of returning from hikes, it’s common to see photo’s on
social media posted, tagged and described by friends. That said, bad photography and poor results
have never been more common either. Almost everyone carries a camera in their
phone, but the image quality is always lacking when blown up to a size larger
than that of a small tablet screen. Panoramas
with smartphone cameras can at first glance be nice as well, but often show
striping from slight differences in metering or sensor noise. Most smartphone cameras have become so
automatic that they no longer give the user control over camera settings since
most users don’t know how to use them.
Instead, carry a small portable point and shoot camera which allows for
better images due to a larger image sensor and control from traditional camera
functions. In this post, I hope to give readers some
tips for how to take better quality photos with a typical point and shoot
camera.
First we need some background on photography and digital
photography. I’ll be brief so if you
want more in depth coverage feel free to google terms. To me, photography consists of two distinct
actions – framing the shot and selecting the settings. This post will focus on camera settings.
The goal in basic landscape photography is usually to
recreate what the photographer sees, maybe with some slight alterations to add
drama to the shot. Advanced landscape
photographers look to modify the image to really increase the drama, but that’s
beyond this post. For our purposes, the
end goal is to walk away with a picture that accurately portrays what we are
looking at. The biggest settings that affect that goal are white balance, exposure,
ISO, F-stop and shutter speed.
Oversimplified, white balance is what color the camera
believes is white. The source of the
light fools the camera into believing some other color is white and causes
colors to look off. Blue images in snowy
landscapes are common because the wrong white balance was used. Try playing with your camera’s settings to
fix it when your are shooting, there are usually white balance modes for most
types of scenes – or you can try automatic white balance and hope for the best.
Your computer monitor uses a similar setting.
Exposure refers to how much light we allow the image sensor
to record and it’s determined by the combined effect of ISO, F-stop and shutter
speed. Too much light or overexposure makes
bright spots such as clouds, sky or distant peaks become washed out but objects
in the shadows are well defined. Too
little light and the darker areas of the shot are lost but the clouds look great.
We usually want something in the middle
or a “correct” exposure. F-stop, shutter speed and ISO are combined to change
the exposure of the shot which is measured by the camera’s light meter. The light meter looks something like this,
which shows a 2/3 reduction in exposure:
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| Typical light meter |
Or in simpler camera’s the symbol to adjust the metering
might
look like this:
The light meter is a measure of how much light the camera
settings will let into the sensor. We
can change the metering by adjusting the ISO, F-stop and shutter speed. The ISO is a measure of image sensor
sensitivity to light, the F-stop is a measure of fast the aperture will allow
light into the sensor and the shutter speed is how much time the sensor will
record light.
To understand these settings let’s imagine a bucket being
filled with water from a hose. The
bucket represents the light meter and we will fill it with light or water in
this analogy. The hose is our lens and out
of it flows the water or light. If we want to fill the bucket (get the
exposure) more quickly we could use a larger diameter hose, or a wider
aperture. Lens aperture widths decrease exponentially
with an increasing number – so an F-stop of F4.0 is 16 times faster than an F-stop
of F8.0. That means we would only have
to turn the hose on for one-sixteenth as long with the F4.0 to fill the bucket
to the same level. Finally, we can
change the ISO – which is really the size of the bucket. A smaller bucket will fill faster and a
larger will fill slower. Again, this
relationship is backwards since an ISO of 800 represents a much smaller bucket
than an ISO of 200. The 800 ISO bucket
will fill 4 times faster than an ISO 200 bucket, since the speed doubles every
time the ISO doubles. How high we fill
the bucket is the exposure. Overfill the
bucket and it’s an over exposed image, under fill it and it’s
underexposed. The flow in the hose depends on how much light
is in the scene – lots of flow in a bright sunny day, but very little in a shot
of the stars.
So why have so many ways of filling a bucket? Well, each setting has an effect on the
image. A smaller ISO setting, or larger
bucket will mean more light (water) is collected. So we have more detail and more information
to work with. When we increase the size
of the image there will be more detail. At
higher ISO’s the image becomes pixelated and fuzzy due to image sensor
noise. Larger image sensors found in
bigger camera’s become less pixelated and have less fuzziness or noise and can
use higher ISO’s without problems.
If we change the size of the hose or aperture, it changes
how much of the image is in focus. The
part of the image in focus is called the focal plane and the width of it is
called depth of field. A smaller hose,
or aperture, such as an F8.0 will give us a deep depth of field with less
blurring in the background. That means
our subject and most of what’s behind it will be in focus. A very large aperture, such as an F-1.8, will
give a very narrow depth of field, especially with near subjects, and a lot of
blurr in the background.
The length of time we leave the hose on, or the shutter
speed, will also affect how we fill the bucket.
A very fast shutter speed such as 1/2000 will stop time – water droplets
in a water fall are frozen in place or the hair of a running stallion is
stopped instantaneously. A long shutter
speed will allow the waterfall to condense into a pleasant blur or for car
lights at night to form bright streaks across a highway.
These three settings effect on the exposure are measured by
our camera’s light meter measured in “stops”.
1 “stop” half is the amount of light the camera thinks the image needs since
the light meter is just the camera’s educated guess of how much light will give
a pleasant image. So if we lower the exposure by 1 stop, we reduce the amount of light our camera records by 1/2. On more advanced
camera’s we can change how the light meter measures the light in the
image. It can use a broad average of the
amount of light in the entire image, concentrate the metering on the amount of
light in the center of the image, or concentrate it entirely on a small
dot. In any case, it’s the camera’s best
guess as to what combination of settings will work best.
The problem is, despite all the technology we are still
smarter than cameras. Most cameras will
over expose bright landscapes that end up washing out the terrain but depicting
the sky perfectly. A quality point and
shoot will have a high definition screen and you’ll be able to see this effect
after or even as you take the photo.
Instead, try reducing the exposure by 2/3 of a stop – like the light
meter image at the top of this post.
That will lower the amount of water in our bucket and may give a nicer
image.
Another common problem is a blurry image in a dark
forest. A dark forest means the flow in
our hose is very low so the camera has to hold the hose, or shutter open too long
allowing the movement of our hands to blur the image. We either
need a bigger hose or a smaller bucket! If
we make our hose larger – lower the F-stop – a faster shutter speed is needed
and less blur from camera movement will happen.
However, that means the background may be too out of focus. Instead, we can increase the ISO which will
also need a faster shutter speed. Around
an ISO of 800 or so, most cameras will create unpleasant noise and pixilation,
so this only works to a point. In the
end, a combination of both may work best.
The easiest way to adjust these settings quickly is to set
the camera for “A” mode or Aperture priority on the large dial at the top of the camera.
This lets us choose the aperture with one camera control and the light
meter setting with the other, while the camera decides what shutter speed to
use to get that light meter setting. The
ISO is usually held constant and can be adjusted through the camera’s
menu. I keep my camera in this mode
about 90% of the time, only occasionally using “S” or shutter priority to get
blur on a waterfall. Read your camera’s manual to find out what the other
settings mean.
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| Typical mode dial |
Another useful setting is HDR, short for High Dynamic
Range. It’s common to take a picture of
a couple in front of a mountain, only to have their faces come out too
dark. If your camera has this setting it
will take three photos as quickly as possible and stitch them together. Each picture is taken at a different exposure
– one underexposed, one at the exposure setting and one over exposed. The couples faces will show up better in an
over exposed photo, the mountain better in the “correct” exposure and the sky
better in the over exposed image.
Together they will combine to create an image closer to what we see with
our eyes. However, if you set the
difference exposure of the 3 images too high, the image will turn out strange
looking and seem fake. This is a common
mistake, I recommend sticking to 1 “stop” of difference between images to
prevent it.
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Hopefully this post has helped your understanding of how
digital photography works and can help you take better images, if not feel free
to ask in the comments!
