Learn to understand the exposure triangle cheat sheet and balance ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed .”

There are three main controls Digital Cameras that must be coordinated to create a balanced exposure – an image with a good variety of tones that is neither too bright nor too dark. They are Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO. This exposure triangle cheat sheet will help you to capture well balanced photography.

The shutter speed determines the amount of time the sensor is exposed to light. Aperture is the size of the Aperture on the lens through which this light passes through. And ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor to light. Change any setting, and you’ll also need to change one (or both) of the others to compensate.

Although the scales used for these controls are all different – shutter speed is measured in seconds (or fractions of a second), the F-Stop Aperture, while the ISO uses multiples of 100 – increasing or decreasing any of these settings to the next unit in its scale is achieved by doubling or halking its value, called ‘Stop’.

Thus, a Shutter Speed of 1/250 sec can be doubled at a Stop to 1/125 sec or halved to 1/500 sec. An aperture of f/5.6 leaves twice as much light as f/8 or half as f/4. And the ISO 400 is twice as sensitive to light as ISO 200 and half as iso 800.

Increasing one of these settings in a Stop means that you will also need to decrease one of the other settings in a Stop for the same overall exposure. However, in addition to determining the brightness of the image, these settings also have an important creative effect on the appearance of the image.

A fast shutter speed freezes movement, while a slow shutter speed records anything moving like a blur. A narrow Aperture provides greater depth of field than a wide Aperture, which means that more or less of the scene is in focus.

And the higher the ISO, the noisier the image. Let’s see how these exposure triangle cheat sheet settings can be used to our advantage…

Opening

To ensure that the model is isolated from the background, we use a wide F/2.8 Aperture. So to compensate for the increase in light entering the lens, we balance it with a very fast shutter speed of 1/3200 sec.

Shutter Speed “Shutter Speed”

To blur the movement of the water, we need to set a long exposure time. Shutter Speed has been adjusted to 15 seconds, so we stopped our Aperture to f/11 to restrict light and increase depth of field.

Iso

Shooting music shows means working in low light, so we’ve increased the ISO to 3200 to make the image sensor more sensitive to light. We use an f/1.4 Aperture to retain a fast shutter speed – allowing you to freeze movement on stage