Workflow for the ideal camera settings

Thursday 9 July 2020, 09:55 by Michelle Peeters | 37,847 views | 30 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

A system or workflow that automatically leads you to the right camera settings (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) for a particular photo situation sounds too good to be true. Yet it is possible, as I will try to show in this article.

I will not explain in great detail here what shutter speed, aperture and ISO do. You can read about this in a number of articles that we have already written about them here. The cheat sheet below actually shows you the whole story in a nutshell.

In this article, I will only explain the workflow that lets you always choose the right shutter speed, ISO and aperture, in every photography situation you can imagine. Aperture, shutter speed and ISO are the most important camera settings in photography, and to control these 3 settings you really need a deep intuition of how they work.

The most important question you should constantly ask yourself is: how bright or light will your photo be? One of the aspects of exposure is the brightness of the outside world, in other words the ambient light.

Sometimes you can change the ambient light by adding light with a flash, or you can filter or dim it by using neutral density filters. But usually you will have to deal with the light that is already there, the existing or ambient light. So what can you do to set the camera itself differently to capture more or less light?

The exposure triangle

Just a short explanation of the exposure triangle. The final exposure in the photo of a scene is determined by the interaction between aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity, as you can see in the cheat sheets above and below.

The duration of your exposure is the shutter speed. Shutter speed also affects how much movement you capture. You may need 1/30 second, 1/50 second or an even faster shutter speed when you are hand-holding your camera.

Every camera has an aperture that lets light in to make your photo lighter or darker. The aperture you choose also changes the depth of field. Depth of field is how much of your photo is sharp from front to back. The larger the aperture, the smaller the number, the more blurred the background will be.

Workflow / step-by-step plan

There are three ways to capture more light: ambient light, shutter speed, aperture. If your photo is still too dark, you can increase your camera's ISO.

The best way to understand the system or workflow, see the diagram below, is to look at a few example photos, where the steps, 1 to 5, in the diagram can be followed each time.

Example photo 1: aperture only, low ISO

The example photo below shows a tree frog. The camera settings I used were: ISO 100, aperture f/4, shutter speed: 1/250. This may look like a difficult photo to take, but the settings were actually very simple.

I always start by setting the ISO value (1). I always set it to the lowest possible value, which is 100. I do this because you do not actually capture more light by increasing the ISO. You get 'cleaner' photos with less noise by setting a low ISO and making your photos brighter with aperture and shutter speed instead.

The next step is aperture (2), the most important camera setting because it affects the depth of field. Depth of field has a huge creative impact on the appearance of your photo. Here I wanted to isolate the frog with a lovely blurred background.

So I used the largest possible aperture on my lens, the largest opening means the most background blur. With this lens, the largest aperture happened to be f/4. So the next step was to choose the right shutter speed (3) that gave me the right brightness. Here, that turned out to be 1/250 second.

And in this case that was ideal because it was fast enough to eliminate any motion blur. If the frog had jumped away, the photo at 1/250 would have been blurred. But it just sat there calmly, so my photo is completely sharp. This was an easy photo because I got exactly the settings I wanted.

Example photo 2: faster shutter speed

Below you can see a slightly different but more complicated example. I took this butterfly photo at 1/400, aperture f/4, ISO 280. Again, I started by setting the ISO value (1), first to the lowest possible value of 100. I wanted a blurred background again, so I set the aperture (2) to f/4 once more.

Here I would have got the correct exposure at a shutter speed (3) of 1/150. So why did I not use that shutter speed? Motion blur! The butterfly was sitting on a flower moving in the wind. And close-up photography already magnifies every camera shake.

So to get a sharp photo here, I had to use a faster shutter speed (4), namely 1/400. And this is also where the system comes into play. It is actually a kind of puzzle. I have set ISO, aperture and shutter speed, and now I need the bottom of the diagram.

So, back to aperture. I would rather not change my aperture here because I am happy with my shallow depth of field. So I keep it at f/4. That brings me back to ISO. My photo is too dark with the settings I have now, so I have no choice but to increase the ISO (5).

That is not ideal, and it is true that there is a little more noise in this photo when you zoom right in, but this is still much better than capturing motion blur or the wrong depth of field, which would ruin your photo.

Example photo 3: slower shutter speed

Here is another photo, this time a cityscape, Matera in Italy. I did the same thing as before: ISO 100 (1) to start with. And then the depth of field (2). That was not really a problem here, because whatever you do, you can hardly achieve that shallow depth of field when everything is so far away.

So I simply set an average aperture (2), f/11. That is a good balance because medium apertures usually produce an even sharper image than the smallest aperture, f/32 for example.

The depth of field was not a problem in this case, because everything is far away anyway and I was photographing with a wide-angle lens. In such a situation, you might as well choose an average aperture. Next it was time for the shutter speed (3).

As you can see, the sun had just gone down when I took this photo. And to get the right brightness in the exposure, I needed a fairly slow shutter speed, 1.6 seconds in this case.

If I had held my camera to take this photo, it would have been quite blurred up close, because I cannot keep my hands completely steady for 1.6 seconds. But I used a tripod, which gives you so much more flexibility with slow shutter speeds.

So the photo at 1.6 seconds is incredibly sharp. You may notice that the clouds in the background are slightly blurred because they moved during the exposure. It does not really bother me because they are not the main subject, but this is what you get when your shutter speed becomes a little slower.

Example photo 4: increase the ISO

Next, a wildlife photo that was more complicated to take. You may already be able to see some of the difficulties in the photo by looking at it for a moment. The weather was not very bright, the subjects were moving quite quickly and I wanted a lot of depth of field to get all three puffins reasonably sharp..

I also did not want overly blurred backgrounds here. I really wanted to be able to make out the lighthouse in the distance to some extent.

So let us go through the process again. I started with ISO 100 (1) again, and then set the aperture (2) to whatever I needed to get the right depth of field. Unfortunately, I needed a lot of depth of field here, in a way. I set f/16. Why is that such a shame?

An f/16 aperture is very small. This small opening gave me a lot of depth of field, but let very little light through. And then on to the shutter speed (3). To get the right brightness, I needed a shutter speed of 1/50. But that simply was not going to work. The birds were flying far too fast.

In fact, they were flying so fast that I would have needed a shutter speed of 1/2000. And even that is not fast enough, as you can see motion blur on one of the birds' wings when you zoom in. But 1/500 was the absolute slowest exposure I could have here.

If you then go back through the diagram, I could not really change the aperture (2) because I genuinely needed this depth of field, so I left it at f/16. And then ISO (5) was the only thing left. I had no choice here but to increase the ISO (5) to 3200, otherwise my photo would simply have been too dark.

I could have taken a really dark photo and brightened it afterwards in Photoshop, but this would not improve the image quality. It is better to increase the ISO (5). And these then became my final camera settings: ISO 3200, aperture f/16, shutter speed 1/2000.

When you zoom in, you can certainly see some grainy and discoloured areas in the photo. That is an unavoidable consequence that I will have to live with. The only way to solve this problem is to use a slower shutter speed (4) or a larger aperture (5). Both would have had consequences that I did not want to accept in this case.

Example photo 5: high ISO and large aperture

The final example to round things off is the photo below of the Milky Way. These kinds of photos are not easy to take, and many people want to know how to do it. We go through the same process again, starting with the ISO setting (1) at 100.

Next, go to aperture (2). Everything here is some distance from my camera, so perhaps an average or even small aperture would work. Say f/8. And then it is time for the shutter speed (3) again. One thing that is important when photographing the Milky Way is that the stars move across the sky.

It is not something you can observe with the naked eye, but with your camera everything exposed for longer than 20 seconds becomes blurred. This also depends on your lens and the direction in which you are looking. In any case, take some test photos! The absolute longest exposure time I could get away with was 25 seconds.

With these settings, however, your photo looks completely black. So let us go through the process again. I skip the aperture (2) again because I really want that depth of field, although this is less relevant in astrophotography because of the distance, but I will come back to that later.

So it is time to raise my ISO (5). But it seems that I would need an ISO of 25,600 to get a photo that is bright enough.

That is hardly a recipe for good image quality, but what is left? There is hardly any ambient light here, and I have maximised my shutter speed. A flash certainly would not light up the stars because they are stars... So the only thing left is to use a larger aperture, so that I can capture more light.

I use the largest aperture on my lens: f/2.8. I do not like doing this for landscape photography because you lose depth of field. But it was my only option. So the final settings were f/2.8, 25 seconds, and I get a well-exposed photo at ISO 3200 instead of 25,600.

It is still a fairly high ISO, and I can certainly see some grain and noise when I zoom in. You can also see some areas that are blurred because of the wide-open aperture setting. And there is no solution for that.

But if you look at the photo as a whole, it is sharp. I had to compromise on ISO (5) and depth of field (5), and that is not ideal, but it does not ruin the photo either.

Workflow in brief

To finish, I will summarise the workflow with the actual steps once more. Start with ISO (1). Set the base ISO to the lowest value on your camera. For most cameras, that is ISO 100. Then move on to aperture (2) and choose the value that gives you the right depth of field.

Whether you want a shallow or deep depth of field, you determine this with your aperture. Then move on to the shutter speed (3). Set the value that gives you the correct exposure, purely and simply. This depends on the ambient light, but often you will be finished after this step. Except when this shutter speed gives you motion blur.

If you do not want motion blur, you need to use a faster shutter speed (4). Your photo will often become too dark now. The final step is to get that brightness back.

You can simply change the ambient light if you have control over it, but normally it comes down to using a higher ISO (5) or possibly a larger aperture (5). Both settings in step 5 involve a compromise.

I personally always start by changing the ISO (5) because I am very particular about my depth of field and would prefer to keep the same aperture. But as I have shown with the Milky Way photo, that is simply not always possible. So this is your workflow, in 5 steps to an ideal exposure for most photography situations!

In practice, it goes much faster than it seems here. If you only photograph one type of subject, you can probably use the same ISO and aperture values for a whole series of photos.

You can even let your camera determine the shutter speed automatically to achieve the correct exposure. You do this by setting your camera to semi-automatic mode, in this case aperture priority.

And that makes this workflow almost too complicated. But at least you now have the basics. Shutter speed, aperture and ISO are more important than other settings in photography. And this is a system that certainly will not let you down and will make you use your camera settings more consciously, so you can get exactly the photo you had in mind!

Dit artikel is voor het laatst bijgewerkt op 9 juli 2020.
De eerste publicatiedatum is maandag 9 maart 2020, 23:32.

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