Camera Settings For Beginners (Bonus Episode)

This week’s surprise bonus episode is all about camera settings for beginners. In less than 10 minutes, we're breaking down the three main camera settings, what they actually do, and a few simple guidelines to help you start shooting with confidence. If the terms shutter speed, aperture, and ISO still feel confusing, this episode will give you a solid foundation without overwhelming you with a bunch of new vocabulary. Enjoy!

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Transcript

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Welcome back to another episode of Get the Picture. I'm Tori Elizabeth, wedding photographer, travel photographer, educator, and your host. Today we're doing a mini episode on camera settings. So I'm actually just gonna get right into it because I'm gonna keep this one pretty short, like five minutes. Hello, welcome back. Today we are talking about the most frustrating thing for any beginner photographer, which is manual camera settings. I am gonna go over each of the settings, define them, and teach you how to gauge what you should be at for each setting. Um, the range you should stay within, why you should stay within that range, how they work together, just kind of the basics, and we will go into a deep dive of the exposure triangle in a later video, but today we're just covering the basics. So you have three main settings if you don't already know, and I will put them on YouTube if you're watching on YouTube over the screen. They are first shutter speed, second aperture, and third ISO. So we're gonna start with shutter speed. In my personal opinion, shutter speed is the first thing you should always set. Shutter speed is how fast you're taking a photo. It controls whether the photo is blurry or if it's sharp and you've preserved the moment. Um the reason that I think this is the most important setting is because if a photo is blurry, unless it's unless it's intentional blur, it's kind of useless. So unless it's not, you know, unless it's in focus, not blurry in the first place, you can't use it. So that needs to be the first thing that's set. Shutter speed is a fraction, so it's one over something. It it describes how fast your shutter is opening and closing. So for example, one over a hundred is one one hundredth of a second. So your shutter is opening and closing at a rate of one one hundredth per second. Um, a high shutter speed is one one thousandth of a second, that's like super fast. Um, so a good starting point for shutter speed, I know one over one hundred sounds really fast. It's actually really slow. One one hundredth is very slow. That's a good shutter speed to get a blurry photo. So a good starting point is to stay at one over four hundred or above at all times. So the denominator should always be bigger than 400. So technically, a smaller fraction, you could say a smaller shutter speed, but typically people say raise your shutter speed because you're increasing the denominator. So when we talk about raise your shutter speed, we're referring to the denominator. So I would stay at one over 400 or higher, as in a higher denominator, at all times, just for a beginner. Me personally, I do go lower than one over 400, but it's because I know my camera very well. I know what I'm personally capable of shooting at in order to keep my photo not blurry. So as a beginner, I would recommend staying above one over 400 at all times, or you're gonna end up with a lot of blurry photos, especially if there's movement involved. If you're trying to take photos of sports, someone running, um, shooting a basketball, anything like that, you want to be at one over a thousand or higher at all times. And if someone's hitting a ball or shooting, like shooting a basketball, hitting a baseball, kicking a soccer ball, the ball moves so fast. You need to be at like one over two thousand for your shutter speed. So one over a thousand for like running, one over two thousand for hitting a ball. That's for sports. Um, for example, for couples, if I'm taking a photo and they're standing still, I can be at one over 400. If I have them like swinging hands and running around, I want to be at like one over 800, one over a thousand. So that's kind of your reference point for shutter speed. Your second setting that you are gonna set after your shutter speed is your aperture. So let's say you default your shutter speed to one over 400, then you go to aperture. I'm gonna assume for the purposes of this video that you're shooting on a kit lens because a lot of you watching probably have a Canon Rebel and a kit lens, like a like a 24 to 55 or maybe like a 50 millimeter, something like that. So I'm gonna assume that your lens can't but go below f3.5 or f4. If your lens only goes to f4, you're pretty much gonna leave it at f4 most of the time. The only reason you would raise it up is if you're taking like family or group photos, in which case you would raise it to somewhere between like f8 to f11. Aperture describes the depth of field or basically controls the focus of your photo. So, for example, take this room right now. If there was someone standing behind me, like a foot behind me, like at the wall, they would be blurry while I would be in focus. The camera is focusing on me because I'm on a shallow depth of field. So it's only capturing this line right here, it's not capturing all the way back here. So it your camera is your depth of field, your aperture controls how much is in focus. So it's kind of the way that your camera is focusing and how much of the photo is in focus. So basically, what you need to understand for now is that if you want to capture more this way and more this way in focus, you need to be on a higher depth of field. So a higher aperture, it's also called f-stop, higher f stop. So it's measured by the f something point something. So f you know 5.6, f 2.0. That's your f stop. So f4, if you're on a kit lens, is what you're gonna be on for couples, sports, portraits, all that stuff. If your lens goes lower, you can go down to f2 or f2.8 for all those things. Your last camera setting is ISO. ISO controls how bright your photo is, and your ISO is basically gonna go to whatever it needs to be at to properly expose your photo. So you first set your shutter speed one over 400 for still subjects, one over a thousand for moving subjects, then you set your f stop, f4 if you're on a kit lens, f2 or f2.8, if you're on a different type of lens for, and that goes for portraits, couples, all those things. If you're doing families or group photos, then your f-stop needs to be higher, and then you're gonna set your ISO to whatever it needs to be to be properly exposed. That might be ISO 400, that might be a thousand. The higher you go with your ISO, the more noise you get in your image. And on YouTube, I'll put an example of what I'm talking about about that. But noise is loss of detail and like grain, um basically just like loss of detail and lower quality in a photo. Uh, so we don't want that, it's not like cute grain that you add to a photo, it's not good grain. So um, noise happens when you raise your ISO, and so generally the rule of thumb is keep your ISO as low as possible at all times, but you do have to raise it up in order to properly expose a photo. So if you're shooting, for example, in broad daylight, there should be no reason that you should be higher than ISO 100. And if you're shooting at night and it's really dark, then your ISO is gonna have to be a lot higher than that. So, just to recap, you set your shutter speed first because you need the photo to be not blurry in focus, then you set your aperture second because you need to make sure that you have the full subject in focus and that the depth of field isn't too small or it will blur like the sides of your subject, like the sides that you don't want those blurred. And then you're gonna set your ISO last to properly expose your photo. The reason I tell you to set your ISO last is ISO is the most forgiving setting. Some people would disagree with this, but ISO can be fixed, like a high ISO can be fixed in Lightroom. Um, they have like Lightroom AI denoise now, and it will really clean up the photo. So if your photo is too noisy and you have to raise your ISO too much, you don't really have to worry about that anymore because of Lightroom denoise. Now, we obviously want to avoid that and still keep our ISO as low as possible, but it is still an option, and I'll have to make another video on how to effectively use denoise in a way that isn't like distorting or making your subjects look weird at all. So those are your three camera settings. That is the basis of the exposure triangle, and those are all of my tips for beginners on how to set and in which order to set those settings. Like I said, I will do another deep dive into the settings a different day, but for now that's all. Thanks so much for watching and have a great day. Bye.