It goes almost without saying that the camera is the fundamental tool of a photographer. But of course, I’m saying it. You can’t write without knowing how to write or type and you can’t build a house without knowing how to use a hammer (among many other tools).
It is crucial that you learn how to use your camera. And, yes, we’ll be using your phones. And I am certain all of you know how to take a photo with your phone. But before we can talk about the content of a photo, we have to know how to properly create one.
This lesson will look at how to take control of the camera in your phone and explore apps beyond the basic camera app.
Specifically, we’ll look at how to control the fundamentals of your photo with your phone:
If we can master these, we can produce technically excellent photos.
We’ll start with basic terminology and then put those ideas into practice with the video tutorials and activities for this week.
Here are the objectives for this lesson:
By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 2 Course Schedule.
Please direct technical questions to the IT Service Desk.
The built-in camera app on your phone will often work well, and I imagine you are all familiar with at least the basics. But you will have more control over your photos if you take more control over the settings.
For class, please download and install the free Adobe Lightroom Mobile app. You are encouraged to use this app during the semester.
Video tutorial on using basic camera app on an iPhone.
Video Tutorial on using the Lightroom Mobile app.
Make sure you have watched the two video tutorials on using the camera with both the basic app and Lightroom. Then follow these guidelines to prepare for the Camera Practice Discussion.
Take a photo of something in your life—it can be a person or some object that you think looks visually interesting.
Whatever you photograph, have it off to the side, or near the top or bottom, and close to the camera. Use the apps to control the focus, and perhaps the exposure, so that the person or object is in focus.
Both are examples of shallow depth of field—limiting what is in focus, whether it’s the foreground or background.
In the next discussion, post your photo and two questions or comments you have about using the camera apps. What doesn’t make sense? What tricks do you have that work for you?
As noted earlier, you’re encouraged to use the Lightroom Mobile app for taking photos. The app gives you more control over your camera settings which will give you better photos AND teach you more about how a camera works. Here are a few tips for using the app.
You can process them in your camera, but it will be easier to download them as DNG files and edit them in Lightroom or Photoshop on your computer.
These video tutorials will help with Lightroom:
Watch this Tutorial on manually downloading your Lightroom DNG images.
Exposure is how much light reaches the sensor. Our goal is a proper exposure. Just the right amount of light. It’s the Goldilocks scenario. Too much light and our photos are overexposed. They will be too bright. Information is lost if areas are overexposed to the point of becoming a pure white and that information cannot be recovered.
Too little light and we end up with underexposed images. The photos will be too dark and some areas will be pure black, again missing information that cannot be recovered.
So our goal is a proper exposure. In general this means a wide range of tone, ranging from dark areas to bright but retaining detail throughout all or most of the image. There are exceptions of course. In a photo of a snowman against white snow, proper exposure would not include a wide range. Most or all of the image would be bright. But our goal would still be to maintain detail and information in those bright areas.
Notice the pure white highlights in the first photo. The detail is lost and couldn’t be recovered in Photoshop. The same is true of the dark areas in the third image. Only the middle image has a full range of tones and is properly exposed. This middle image has a lot of information that could be further adjusted in Photoshop.
We control exposure with three tools, called the Exposure Triangle.
Together these three tools form what we call the exposure triangle as outlined in the text and in this week’s video tutorial. This is probably the hardest technical skill to internalize. By that I mean, it takes many students a while to be able to quickly set a proper exposure. So don’t become frustrated if you don’t get it at first. But don’t expect to get it without practice and repetition.
We want our pictures to be sharp and clear. Or, at least we want to be in control of which parts of our photo are sharp and clear. Sharpness has several meanings in this context, and several factors to consider.
A lens, in this case a complex camera lens, gathers in light and can focus that light. Imagine a tiny point of light at ten feet away. If the camera lens is not set at ten feet then that point of light will be a blurry circle. As we focus closer and closer to ten feet that circle gets smaller and smaller. As we focus at exactly ten feet that point is finally focused by the lens as a single point. That’s a very overly simple explanation of focus.
Conversely, if we focus on something at ten feet away, objects nine or 11 feet away will be slightly out of focus, while objects five or 15 feet away will be even more blurry. (One kind of blurriness is from being out of focus).
Let’s continue this thought experiment. If I focus the camera at something exactly ten feet away, then everything ten feet away will be in focus. You could draw a circle around you at ten feet, with your camera at the center. Everything on the circle will be in focus. And everything less than or further than ten feet will be out of focus to some degree.
That degree of ‘out of focusness’ (a phrase I just made up) is called Depth of Field. Remember that phrase. We’ll come back to it in future lessons.
You can control what is in sharp focus on your phone as shown in the phone tutorials. One factor that controls depth of field is the size of the sensor of the camera. Phones have very small sensors so they can fit in your phone and your phone can fit in your pocket. One side effect of this is that most of your image will be in focus, most of the time. In fact, it is difficult to make the background blurry without manipulating the image with software fixes. That soft blurry background that can be so pleasing is difficult to create with your phone.
Camera and subject movement are affected by shutter speed, and both can cause a loss of sharpness. If the camera moves while we take a photo, the entire photo will be blurry (a different blurry from out of focus blurry).
This can definitely be a problem with your phone. In darker situations your camera will slow the shutter sped to let in more light, as any camera would. This can create blurry photos for two reasons:
If our subject moves while we take the photo, he, she, or it may be blurry depending on how fast he, she, or it is moving and the shutter speed.
Shutter speed is how long the sensor is exposed to light. When we take a photo and press the shutter release button it’s as if a window opens and closes.
If that window opens and closes quickly, we have used a fast shutter speed. That means very little light has entered the camera. But it also means we won’t get camera or subject movement. Our photos, if they are in focus, will be sharp and clear. If we leave the shutter open longer, a slow shutter speed, we let in more light but risk blurry photos.
Shutter speeds are represented in fractions of a second, except for very long exposures that might be used to photograph a nighttime scene for example. Your phone may show a shutter speed of 1/1000 for example. This is one thousand of a second—a very fast shutter speed that can freeze a subject’s movement.
If you use an app that shows you the shutter speed, such as the Lightroom Mobile app, keep an eye on the shutter speed. Try to keep your shutter speed above 1/250 or faster for moving subjects.
For fast moving subjects, such as athletes, race cars, small children at play, we will want faster shutter speeds to freeze their action. 1/1000 or faster is commonly used in sports photography for example.
And sometimes we will intentionally use slow shutter speeds to create blur to show motion. This is something we will discuss in future lessons.
While not shot on a phone, these photos demonstrate what happens as you change shutter speeds.
Shutter speed 1/15 Shutter speed 1/60 Shutter speed 1/1000
Figure 2.4. Children playing, photographed at three different shutter speeds.
Notice how increasing the shutter speed affects the sharpness. In the first image the children are blurry because they are jumping and the house is blurry because the camera moved during the exposure.
In the second the children are still blurry, though less so. At 1/60 it’s possible to hold the camera steady though you still need to be careful.
In the final photo a very fast shutter speed freezes their motion.
A fast shutter speed, about 1/1000 of a second freezes the motion of the baseball player in mid-flight.
A slow shutter speed, about 1/15 of a second and a technique known as ‘panning,’ created the sense of movement in this photo. The camera follows the curling athlete as he slides. Since the camera and the subject are moving together, it’s as if he isn’t moving. The background blurs while he is relatively sharp. We will learn more about this technique in later lessons.
A very long exposure and a tripod was used to create this photo. The streaks are star trails created with an exposure that lasted several hours.
White Balance is the final basic property we will discuss this week.
Light comes in a variety of flavors. Sunlight is different from a fluorescent light or the lamp in your bedroom. We’ve all seen a rainbow and perhaps you have some understanding of how they are made. White light from the sun is made up of a mixture of colors, the colors of the rainbow. The lamp in your room is made up of a different mix, more yellows, reds and orange than the sun.
Our camera needs to know how to record different kinds of light or the color of your photo will not be accurate. White Balance is setting the camera to properly interpret the color of the light that hits the sensor.
For most of our needs the auto white balance setting (AWB) does a good job. When the light is unusual—mixed kinds of light for example or a dramatic sunset—Lightroom Mobile allows you to set a specific white balance.
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The same situation, photographed with the Lightroom app using different White Balance settings. In Figure 2.8, the camera is adjusted for the color of the lamp, so the outdoors is very blue. In Figure 2.9, the outdoor white balance on the camera makes the lamp look very warm. Which is right? That’s up to you, and what you decide is important to the scene. By taking control in the app you can control the outcome.
Much like you can't write without knowing how to write, or build a house without a thorough knowledge of tools, you can't take excellent photos without knowing how to use your camera. In this lesson, we focused on exposure, sharpness, and white balance as basic qualities to producing technically excellent photos.
By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 2 Course Schedule.
Organizing and captioning your photos is not difficult, but it is critical. Next, we will use Lightroom and Photoshop to organize groups of photos, and apply basic image adjustments and captioning to images.