In part 1 I explained what the “Exposure Triangle” was, and if you haven’t read it or do not know what the exposure triangle is, I suggest you read that first.

The exposure triangle is a way for you to get the same exposure (the pictures brightness) while using different settings for artistic purposes. What do I mean by that? Imaging you are taking a portrait outside on a nice clear day. You have decided to place your subject in front of a beautiful row of green bushes. Your subject is well focused, your exposure is perfect, and you take the shot. After looking at it on the back of your camera, you notice that your subject just fades into the background, but why? My first guess would be your settings just need to be adjusted to make your subject stand out more, but how do you do that?

The first thing you notice is that everything in the picture is in focus and that’s great, right? Not necessarily. That might be fine if your portrait included several people, or if you were taking a landscape photo and not a portrait. But, with a portrait, more times than not you need the subject to be your main focus (no pun intended). To do that, you first need to look at your camera settings.

The majority of the time if everything in the image is in focus it’s because your aperture is not properly set for the desired outcome. Many variables can affect this, but I’m only going to discuss how you can adjust it using the information I described in part 1.

For the portrait example I used above we’re going to use the following settings. Your ISO is set at 100, the aperture (fstop) is f8, and the shutter speed is 1/100. Because your aperture is so high (f8 as compared to f2.8) it doesn’t let in as much light, but it will allow more of the image to be in focus. To arrive at the desired outcome, we need to keep the subject in focus while we blur the background (In Photography, blurring the background is often times referred to as bokeh.) So how do you do that? Just change from f8 to a lower number that will blur the background, right? Not exactly.

If you keep all setting the same and only change your aperture for f8 to f2.8, what do you think will happen? If you remember in part 1, I explained that every time you increase or decrease your aperture you are either halving the amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor, or doubling the amount. When you go from f8 to f2.8 you are letting in 8 times as much light. You had to go down 3 f stops, f8 to f5.6, to f4, and finally f2.8. For every stop or change you make towards a lower number (f8 to f5.6) you double the light coming in. So, to go from f8 to f2.8 is there stops. From f8 to f5.6 you double it. From f5.6 to f4 you double again, and so on and so forth. So now with your new settings your image exposure is going to be 8 times brighter. How do we fix it? By using the exposure triangle.

We know we increased the amount of light by the changes we made to the fstop/aperture, now we have to decrease the same amount of light while keep the aperture the same. We learned in part 1 that we can affect the light coming in by changing EITHER the ISO, Aperture, or Shutter Speed, or a combination of three.

So, if we increased the light one way, we must have to decrease the amount of light another way. If we look at our other two settings, ISO and shutter speed we should be able to fix this issue. With ISO we know the smaller the number (100, 200, 400, etc.) the less light will be allowed in. If our ISO is already set at 100, depending on the camera we’re using, we probably can’t go any lower. If we look at shutter speed, we know to lower the amount of light coming in we need a faster shutter speed. In our example above we have our shutter speed set to 1/100. We know we have 3 stops, or 8 times too much light coming in, so we need to adjust our shutter speed to allow 8 times less light to come in so we need to speed it up to what? If you said 1/800, you are correct.

If you made those changes under the same lighting conditions and took another picture, your two images would be exposed exactly the same. What you would now notice is that your subject is nice and sharp, but your background is blurry. This change alone will make your portraits really stand out.

There is a lot more that can written on the subject, but I wanted to help you with the basics while also increasing your chances and ability of capturing a great image.

If you’d like to learn more, please email me at MDGPhoto@MarkDGPhotography.com to discuss what it is you need to know and how I can help you.

Have a great day, ow go and make some beautiful images!

Mark