The 4 Basics

[Loupey]

It’s easy to get sucked in to trying to learn all the fancy features that modern cameras have. Keep in mind that the technical aspect of photography is still based on only 4 simple basic adjustments:

The Focus
The ISO
The Shutter Speed
The Aperture

Once these are fully understood, you can disable and disregard all those other “features” of the camera which I feel always takes more time and thought to use than manually adjusting the above. Auto exposure bracketing? Exposure compensation? Av/Tv? Spot metering? Evaluative metering? Sports mode, Portrait mode, landscape mode,…..? You can forget about all of those.

Since 3 of the 4 adjustments above are used to determine exposure, there are only two manual functions that we are controlling: focus and exposure. Since manual focus issue has been beaten to death , Let’s talk about manual exposure. Here’s what I do in virtually every outing:

1. As soon as I step out of the truck with camera in hand, I look for anything that will be in the same light (as my target subject) that is middle-toned and meter for that. Since all camera meters try to make every scene middle-toned, reading the measurements of a middle-toned object should be “accurate” for any given light.
2. In manual mode, I adjust the shutter speed and/or aperture until the built-in meter reads center (proper exposure). The actual values don’t matter yet – just so long as the meter reading is centered. In this example, the values are 1/250s at f/11
3. Take a test shot (don’t even worry about the focus) and review the image and histogram. Since you just photographed a middle-toned image, the histogram should not be clipped at either end. If your camera doesn’t display a histogram, just look over the image and see that no part is white nor black. In very bright light when I can’t see the LCD image well enough to judge, I look only at the histogram.
4. If the test image/histogram looks right, you can now quickly find the appropriate shutter speed/aperture combination by moving the values in equal stop increments. As long as both are adjusted in unison, every combination will yield the same proper exposure. So for shooting with a straight 300mm, I might use 1/1000s at f/5.6 or 1/750s at f/6.7.

That’s it! I do this while walking to my spots and it takes about 10 seconds. On a cloudless day, I can use this one exposure value from 10am to 3pm. Now if I want to boost/subtract exposure a little for various subjects (light/dark bird, small patch of snow, a spotlight of sun, etc), I can just flick my shutter speed dial a notch or two one way or the other while shooting. That’s my “exposure compensation” .

If the subject runs into the shade or clouds roll in, repeat the above steps. As long as your test subject is middle-toned (green grass, field of brown weeds, light brown sand, etc) and in the same light, exposure will be correct.

Hope you’ll try it. Easy to master. Then you can devote all your attention on the creative side of photography :thumbsup: .