THE BASICS: THE TRINITY + TWO MORE
Settings, settings and less settings
Hey all — here’s a post that’s part ramble and part camera-basics. If you are an experienced hand, read this first part and then jump to the PINK GOTH section.
RAMBLEY BITS
My Philosophy: Your camera is not a photographer, you are.
Your camera is a tool that aids you in the creation of your art. All good artists master their tools. Can a sculptor cut into that marble without an intimate understanding of their chisels? Can a woodworker just put a lathe on “automatic” and stop thinking about the whole thing? Can a painter ignore their paint and brush selection? The answer is obviously no. Even if we add in digital tools*, like CNC machines or tablet “painting” programs, you still need to have a mastery over them to create.
I believe one of the hallmarks of a good artist is the understanding that you are always learning. If you think you have completely mastered something, I think you are not looking hard enough. There are always refinements to refinements.
Automatic Photography is seductive because of all of the AutoMagic™® — this has been true since George Eastman started marketing cameras for non-wizards and is even more true in this age of iPhone photography. It’s easy to pick up the camera/device, point, and shoot.
If the goal is “snapshot,” then AutoMagic™® is the answer, but if the goal is to create Art, then we want that control. Control corresponds directly with creativity.
THE TRINITY: EXPOSURE
Luckily, despite the worst intentions of the camera manufacturers, there are only three settings* we need to worry about: ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture (ƒ stop). These three settings work together to achieve “exposure,” but each one affects the final image in creative ways. And yes, these are obvious, but the kind of obvious you need to have in your head while working.
Any current digital camera is FULL OF GARBAGE. There are so many settings in so many menus! To fix this, put your camera on RAW mode*. Now you can ignore 80% of the settings in the camera because you are going to process out your images on a computer, which gives you even more control over the creative process.
Shutter Speeds: Sharp? Blurry? Shooting handheld? Camera on a tripod? Moving subjects rendered crisply? Moving subjects rendered as ethereal blurs? Sure, this seems like an easy choice, as most of the time we want sharp subjects, but it’s still a decision that needs to be considered. How you set up your shutter is a creative decision!
Basics: Longer shutters let in more light, faster ones, less, while changing how moving objects are rendered.
Aperture: Large apertures drop focus. Deep ones hold focus over a greater area. These are deeply connected to the focal length as well - focus drops faster at longer focal lengths than shorter ones. And there’s a non-obvious connection as well. At ƒ1.0-2.5, the focus is razor-thin, and the blur is distinctly different at each stop. At ƒ2.8, there is still a drop in focus, but the image quality is different. At ƒ4, things start to smooth out, with more subtle differences. At ƒ22, you start to lose sharpness as you increase DoF from diffraction. All of these are creative choices.
Basics: Wide-open apertures let in more light, smaller ones less, while changing the Depth of Field (front to back sharpness).
ISO: The rule of thumb is that there is less noise and “grain” in a digital image at lower ISO speed settings. At higher ISO settings, both of those increase. In a simplistic sense, the digital sensor only has one ‘speed,’ and when we increase this setting, we amplify that image.
This setting is very specific to your camera — EG, my new Canon R5 shoots a very clean ISO 1600 due to some pretty fancy onboard math that cleans up the signal. With my older Canon 5Ds, I won’t shoot past ISO 400 because the noise is not acceptable above that. Testing is key here!
My quickie definitions: Noise is the appearance of unacceptable artifacts in the image—patterns, lines, weird blocking up of shadows, etc. Grain is acceptable noise. To the eye, it comes across as a random distribution of irregular shapes, aesthetically very similar to actual film grain caused by the way the sensitized silver is distributed on the film base.
Basics: Test your camera to see what is acceptable when looking at the image at 100% on your monitor. RAW also offers you far more noise reduction control in post than the camera can offer.
PLUS ONE MORE: WHITE BALANCE
If you are a RAW photographer already, you might be asking why is it important to set this when you can change it so easily in post? And if you are just switching to RAW, you might be thinking, why not just leave it on AWB (Auto White Balance) and let the camera figure out what the color should look like?
To understand why you want to take control of this, you need a TINY amount of color science. Light (in a super simplistic but useful abstraction) appears in our world on a spectrum from BLUE to WARM. From deep shadows to a candle flame. Our eyes are continually neutralizing this shift. Go inside on a blue sky day, draw all the curtains shut, turn on a tungsten light bulb, set the dimmer to low, and stare at a sheet of white paper. At first, the paper is really warm-toned, but after a while, our eyes adjust, and the paper appears more and more neutral. When it looks normal, now’s the time to go outside, preferably in an area of open shade. Now that sheet of paper appears blue! Once you spend enough time here, that paper once again neutralizes.
The paper isn’t changing; the light is, and so is our eye’s response.
By purposefully choosing a WB setting (either by icon or by Kelvin number), we can choose to interpret the light the way we want it to be from a creative standpoint. A little warmer? Cooler? A lot cooler? Or even purposefully choosing neutral. Therefore it’s a creative choice and one you should be in control of.
With RAW, we get to change this setting in post — but think about it as setting an intention, leaving a message for yourself later when reviewing images.
THIS IS ALL SO BASIC
I 100% Agree! But, these are the bricks your images are built of. If you change any of them, the image changes at a fundamental level. The BEST PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE WORLD TAKEN BY THE BEST PHOTOGRAPHERS are still a product of these foundations.
Assignment: Grab a lens that opens up to at least ƒ2.8 (but wider is better). Find a subject in a scene that has significant background and foreground elements. Shoot it wide open, at ƒ5.6 and at the deepest stop you have. Either print the three images out at a larger print size or view them on a nice big monitor. There is no “right” version, but decide which image is the best, and then try to unpack why it feels better than the other two and how focus comes into that reasoning.
PLUS TWO MORE: FRAMING & LENSING (NOT A SETTING)
These are not settings, but I wanted to lodge them into this post and into your head. Apply the same foundational thinking to your lens choice and how you frame up a picture. The focal length of the lens fundamentally changes the image. Frame up an image carefully with your widest lens. Choose what’s in and out of the image, what’s in the corners—be 100% responsible for all of the image, not just the subject. Now make that same photograph with the longest lens you have. Compare the difference between those images, and take that knowledge with you the next time you are zooming your zoom lens.
DANGER DANGER: MANUAL MODE
The best way to ingrain this into your head, to begin the march towards instinct, is to set your camera manually. Use the big M on the mode dial. Choose a WB by number. Decide to set the zoom lens at 50mm and tape it off so you can’t zoom.
The danger: your images will get WORSE. Not going to lie to you here. A modern digital camera is a technical marvel, able to focus itself, choose (in its opinion) the best combination of ISO, shutter, and ƒ-stop, and make a fully processed JPEG image. It makes a technically good image. When you bravely step into the void and switch off all the Auto-Magics™, you will make mistakes. You will get distracted and forget to pay attention to the light meter. You will suddenly realize the camera was set to 1/50th of a second, and you’ve been jumping around handheld, and your images are all slightly blurry.
BUT.
At some point, it’s going to click. It’s going to make sense. You are going to start making smart choices and build an instinctive workflow. You will wrest creative control and decide how much focus to carry, what focal length you want, whether or not to use a tripod, or how to use blur creatively.
And then it’s going to be BETTER. Your images will be your creations, based on your choices. You are the photographer, not your camera, after all.
PINK GOTH (NEXT LEVEL AUTOMAGIC)
There’s a very early episode of This American Life, with a story by Sarah Vowell, where she investigates the Goth lifestyle. It’s a fun, lighthearted piece, full of her characteristic dry wit. Goth is all about levels of DARKNESS. Black clothing, dyed hair, black boots and dark music**. Towards the end, the person she was interviewing decided that Sarah was so Goth at heart, that she could move to the next level. To PINK GOTH. Because her mastery of the Darkness was so strong, she could make the color PINK as gloomy and gothic as the color BLACK.
If you have MANUAL on lockdown, where settings flow like water from the back of your brain, you can move to the PINK GOTH level of camera control and start using the auto settings. In a fast-moving situation, I’ll use Aperture Priority at ISO 800 on my R5 and make constant use of the -/+ compensation to nudge the exposure up or down. If you are aware of all the decisions being made and agree with them, you could even throw it into P(rogram) mode.
WRAPITUP
I have been using these tools for many, many years now. And I have ‘internalized’ them so that it’s instinctive for me to make these choices —BUT— I still learn in doing. I continually remind myself that there is more to learn. I still find ways to refine how I understand and implement these tools. “Always Learning” is a great mantra to have as a photographer.
Thanks for reading - the next post will be more art, less tech, promise!
-andy
as always, these photographs are © Andy Batt - www.andybatt.com
______________________________________________
*RAW is key. You gain so much creative control over your image. For our trip, I’m going to ask you to shoot RAW+JPEG simply so I can download a JPEG from the camera to my iPad for our on-river image critiques.
**I love some old-school Goth music. I was never Goth but had plenty of Goth friends, and a lot of my formative music crosses over. My first exposure to the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees blew my mind.