The Golden Triangle Explained: Understand it and Master Photography Settings Forever

Modern cameras can feel like mini computers with endless settings, but at the core of every great photograph lies just three: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. 

In this episode of The Wild Photographer, Court unpacks the “Golden Triangle” of photography and explains how these three elements work together to shape exposure, creativity, and artistic intent. Through clear analogies and practical examples, you’ll learn how to balance depth of field, motion, and light to capture the scene in front of you exactly as you envision it. 

Whether you’re exploring landscapes, photographing wildlife, or diving deeper into your craft, this episode provides a straightforward guide to mastering the fundamentals that matter most in mastering photography.

Court's Websites

• Check out my photo portfolio here: shop.courtwhelan.com
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• View my camera kit and recommended camera gear

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Transcript

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Court Whelan (00:00)
There are so many different camera settings in today's modern cameras. They are truly little mini computers that have all sorts of different customization in the menus and the modes. And yeah, it can definitely be overwhelming, but this golden triangle concept, frankly, I think really simplifies the heck out of photography because when we look at all these different options, there really are just three things that matter most. They matter.

two, three times more, 10 times more than all the rest. Yes, the smaller settings like white balance and drive motor and auto focus settings, they're pretty darn important, but when it comes down to the essence of photography, the creativity, the artistry, whether a photo is sharp, the quality of your work, the overall vision, there are really three main settings that I think of with each and every photo,

regardless of all the other nuanced things. And these things, they're pretty straightforward and pretty simple, but today's episode is dedicated entirely to this golden triangle. The reason it's a triangle is not just because we have three things to think about, but they are intimately, intimately related. In other words, when we talk about these three things, spoiler alert, they are aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. When we change one, the others really have to change if we wish to keep...

the exposure the same, When you change one of these three things, the others change kind of in reciprocity. So today's episode is dedicated to the Golden Triangle, what these things do for your photography and how they kind of balance and wax and wane in relation to one another. But before we get in the episode, I wanted to thank big shout out to our key sponsor of today's episode, which is Art Store Fronts.

You've probably heard me talk about art helper.ai a lot. Art Storefronts is kind of their larger, maybe parent organization in designing really pro level photography websites. In other words, a way to sell your art. Art Helper is a great way to help promote your art and create the blog posts and emails, but Art Storefronts is really the mastermind behind all this. And I've got to say, it's been a total game changer for me as I've gone along the process with Art Storefronts.

in creating my own new photo website, which you can check out, shamelessplug, at shop.courtwhelan.com if you wanna see what their platform is all about, how they make it so easy to present your art in a clear, beautiful, aesthetic way. And I've gotta say on the back end, ⁓ it's not a lot of work for me. That's the biggest brilliance of all of it is that there is a huge staff at multiple levels to set this thing up. So I recently got started with Art Storefronts and I really can't say enough about how much I love this platform.

They built a complete system designed to help photographers basically get better results with less stress and less effort in setting up their own website. It's huge for me. I'm constantly having to juggle the creative process with all the work that actually goes into actually selling my photography. Now with Art Storefronts, I've gone from feeling, you know, frankly, pretty time-crunched and a little bit overwhelmed at times to actually excited about the business side of my photography, selling my art. It's a fantastic website.

software system that's designed to help you grow. It's got cutting edge marketing tools that actually automate all the promotional stuff like the social posts, like the emails, et cetera, et cetera. This is all automated as part of the platform. And like I said, the backend support is absolutely top notch. They go out of their way to make sure you are properly supported with real people making progress towards whatever goals you might be setting for yourself. It might be just to get your art out there in aesthetic way.

where you can actually see mock-ups of your photos in living room walls. It might be being able to share very easy links to the purchasing side of all this. The goals could be ⁓ endless in terms of what you want to achieve with the Art Storefronts website. The fourth quarter holiday season is still ahead. That's when a lot of photographers sell a lot of their art. ⁓ It's always the biggest time of year for art sales, plain and simple. So truthfully now is a great opportunity to get started. Take the time to set yourself up for success.

And there's a huge perk for listeners of the wild photographer. If you mention this ad, you will get professional website set up included for free. That means they fully set everything up as part of the package. The team at art storefronts will build and optimize your new art selling website just for you. Waving their optional, know, frankly, it's like an $1,800 setup fee normally, but you mentioned this and that's completely free. yeah, $1,800 value. That's pretty, pretty big.

So check it out at artstorefronts.com. It's really an all-in-one solution for growing your photography business from home.

And don't forget to mention the Wyll photographer to get that professional website set up included absolutely free. The other sponsor I want to mention Lensrentals.com. They are an extraordinary resource for renting and even purchasing lenses. I'm a huge advocate of renting lenses, especially if you're going on a big photo expedition like a wildlife safari. That could be a proper safari in Africa or something in Alaska or even photographing wolves of Yellowstone where you're

probably gonna want some specialized equipment, some things that may either cost a lot to buy outright or things that you may be using specific to just that trip. Maybe you need a really great Northern Lights lens and you're like, ah, you know, I probably won't be using that for other trips. Lensrentals.com, great resource for that. If you use the promo code wildphotographer15, you're gonna get 15 % off. And like I mentioned, if you love the lens,

They give you a really great fair price to purchase it, like a used lens price, And you get to hang on to that exact lens that you may have fallen in love with. So yeah, great, great thing there. That's lensrentals.com and promo code wildphotographer15. Okay, so let's get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, the golden triangle of photography explained.

Like I mentioned, there are so many settings to choose from, but you can really kind of simplify your process, especially if you're learning, wishing to learn, wishing to grow and get into the really creative artistic side that dictates honestly like 90 % of the quality and the vision of your work. It's with aperture, shutter speed and ISO. The basic gist is that these are three different ways. They do work with each other, but there are three relatively distinct ways to let light

into your camera. Let me say that again. There are three distinct but related ways to let light in your camera. So right out the gates, I wanna define this concept of light, because light, obviously, like, it's very subjective. There's a lot of light, there's a little light. We don't use a lot more light to determine what we need to do in setting aperture shutter speed. We actually boil it down to this definition, this term called a stop of light. So not a stop light, but same words.

a stop of light. So anytime we talk about letting in a stop of light or removing a stop of light from your photography, we're talking about essentially one full unit of light based on these things. And that's really what we're gonna get into in today's episode. So if you're letting in a stop of light, you're doubling the amount of light. That's one stop. One stop is double. Let's say we're dialing it down, we're removing a stop of light.

we're cutting the amount of light by half. But as you'll learn, hopefully learn by the end of the episode, it's not that you're always trying to under or overexpose or truly let in less light. When we talk about these stops, it might be in relation to buffering and changing the aperture, but then not actually changing the exposure because as we let in one more stop of light via aperture, we might remove one more stop of light via shutter speed.

And these have all sorts of different applications and purposes. So the three things we're talking about, again, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, why might you want to change those? They really, plain and simple, the first two, aperture and shutter speed, are the lion's share of the artistic ability of your photography. So with aperture, we're talking about depth of field. That's the main thing. Whether you want to have a shallow depth of field or a deep depth of field.

whether you wanna have the entire mountainscape and meadow that's in the foreground and river that's in the background, if you want all those things in focus, you wanna deep depth of field. If you're doing portraiture work, that might be people, that might be wildlife, you want a very shallow depth of field to add that beautiful blur in the foreground and background so your subject is even sharper, or at least it appears even sharper because of that shallow depth of field. that's a real.

key way when and why we would use aperture and prioritize changing the aperture. The second one shutter speed. Basically it's on the spectrum of freezing motion with a really fast shutter speed or blurring motion. That's some of the artistic element or maybe even go into the final extreme of just having a really, really slow shutter speed for night photography. And then ISO really is kind of, we're going to dive deep into this, but it's kind of like your silver bullet where

It just basically allows you more light or less light based on changing this ISO. So ISO, I wanna underline is not really the artistic element of this, but it very much dictates what kind of shutter speed you can get out of your camera, what kind of depth of field you can get out of your camera by changing ISO just at the expense of a little bit of grain and noise in your camera as you increase those ISOs. But don't worry about it right now. I'm just laying out on the table.

We're gonna do a deep dive in the next three sections about each of these things. aperture and shutter speed. I'm gonna talk about these two things in concert and I'm gonna use analogy for how cameras work and how these two things work in your system with, I call it the hose analogy, hose like a garden hose or really more accurately like a garden spigot, like the spigot on the side of your house. So.

Imagine in any scene, whether it's a mountain scene, it's a wildlife scene, it's kids playing sports, whatever it might be, you need a certain amount of light in the scene to essentially reflect what your eyes are seeing. And when you're letting that light amount in the scene, there's basically a quantity of light. And we're gonna say that that quantity of light is analogous to filling up a one gallon bucket of water. You need to let that water flow into the bucket to fill it up appropriately. You need...

to let light flow into your camera to fill it up appropriately with light. Now there's two ways using aperture and shutter speed to do this. And again, hose analogy, spigot analogy, if you have a very, very large spigot, like imagine it's a fire hose type spigot, you can turn that spigot on for a split second and fill up that gallon of water very, very quickly. The size of that spigot is your aperture. So as you get bigger and bigger apertures,

this is the opening of your lens to your camera sensor. So if you have a very, very big opening of your aperture, it's like having a very large hose spigot that fills up that light, that fills up that gallon of water very, very quickly. So as you may have surmised, that amount of time you have the hose on is your shutter speed. Big hose opening, very, very small amount of time you need it on. Now,

let's say we're trying to do a scene and we still need to fill up that gallon bucket of water, because we still need the light, but it's a very, very narrow opening. It's like a trickle of water. Well, guess what? Very narrow aperture means that you have to have it on for a much longer amount of time, right? So if you have that trickle of water, you're going to let it open for, you know, multiple seconds in some cases. And so that's kind of the spectrum. That's the extreme is if you have a very, very narrow

aperture opening which is correlated with those big F numbers like when I would talk about a very narrow opening we're talking about f11 f16 f22 that means for the same amount of light you're definitely going to need to let your shutter open longer than if you were to have a big fire hose type aperture right now the trick with aperture is that it's not quite as linear in terms of the values

So as you'll learn, or as you may already know, with shutter speed, it's very linear, it's very numeric. know, hundredth of a second is half of the amount of time as one fiftieth of a second. You can just do the math, you know, 50 times two is 100, 100 divided by two is 50. So it's very, very easy. Aperture, even though it's relative in the same way, like every stop of light lets in half as much as you go up, it doubles the amount of light as you go down.

it's based on this thing called an aperture table. it's more categorical than the shutter speed, than the ISO. So if you've ever looked at your apertures on your camera or maybe looked at a camera cheat sheet, you see it's gonna go in a range starting at 1.4 all the way up to F22. when you double F1.4 to F2.8, you would think, okay, that might be like,

doubling shutter speed, one over 50 to one over 100, it's not the case. I actually don't want you to worry about the numbers all that much. I want you to just, this is kind of the tricky part, but it's paid huge dividends over the years. I want you to essentially memorize the aperture table. So I have it memorized, I can rattle off right now. As you go from 1.4 to two, that's one full stop. So as you dial from 1.4 to two, you're cutting the amount of light in half. Two to 2.8.

you're cutting it in half. 2.8 to four, cutting in half. Four to 5.6, 5.6 to eight, eight to 11, 11 to 16, 16 to 22. So you can see there, it's not linear. It's not like every time you take those values and double it or halve it, you're getting double or half the amount of light. Every single one of those numbers I just rattled off is a full stop of light. So if you go in one direction, it doubles the light. If you go the other direction, it halves the light.

So I'm gonna say that again, it's very, very worth it to look up an aperture table online and start memorizing those values. And you could almost frankly label them as like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. But I'm gonna say it again, F1.4 to two to two eight to four to five, six to eight to 11 to 16 to 22. Each one of those, let's just do another example. If I were to go to F8 to F11, that cuts my light down in half.

just like going from F2 to F2.8. So you can see how those numbers do not really correlate. ⁓ So yeah, again, highly worth it to memorize that suite of numbers. So when you're dialing your camera and you are doing these kind of mental calculations as you try to find the artistic impression of your scene, those are each one full stop.

speed on the other hand is kind of a lot easier to calculate because it is numeric. It is just truly a number. As you go from 50 to 100, you're cutting your light in half. 100 to 200, these are one over 100th of a second, one over 200th of a second. As you go from notch to notch, from 200 to 400, 400 to 800, you're cutting your light in half. Conversely, if you're going from 400

to 200th of a second, you're doubling the amount of light. So you can see how all these things really play together. Like you might be at f5.6 and one over 100, and you say my photo is too dark, or I really need to increase my shutter speed in order to freeze the motion of this subject. You can go from 100 to 200, but you might have to at the same time, go from f5.6 to f4 to maintain that same exposure.

I'm gonna repeat that, because that's a really, really important example and a really important concept. If you have perfect exposure at f5.6 and one over 100, if you need to go to 1 2 hundredth of a second, you are going to have to then drop down your aperture to let in more light, because remember, you're letting in less light from going one over 100 to one over 200, to let in more light via your aperture, you're gonna have to open it up, which is a smaller number,

which is dropping down one full stop from F5.6 to F4. I know it's getting a little confusing, but this is where, this is the essence of this whole episode is to distill down this relatively confusing concept in this golden triangle. So let's do another example. If you are shooting a mountain scene at F, let's say F8. F8's a great deep depth of field to shoot landscape scenes. And you say, you know what?

it's not quite a bit all in focus. I really wanna go to F11. F11's even deeper depth of field. That's when you have things that are even closer to you in the foreground and you wanna get the whole scene in focus. So you're gonna wanna go F8 to F11 and you're at one hundredth of a shutter speed. To get the same exposure by going F8 to F11 and not messing with that amount of light in your scene, you're gonna at the same time,

gonna have to go down from 100th to 1.50th of a second. Now in that example, that's a great time to think about, oh yeah, that's why a lot of landscape photographers have tripods, because one over 100 is pretty handholdable on an image stabilized lens, but 1.50th, maybe not so much so. And so this whole spectrum of shutter speeds, which really go more or less from like 30 full seconds of being open, that'd like the night photography into the spectrum, all the way, like most fancier cameras go to 1.8000th of a second.

Every time you double or halve, that is one stop. So to let in the same amount of light, you have to play with aperture. Now here's where your real superpower comes in, and I don't want to delay in talking about this because ISO is that magic unicorn. It is that silver bullet. Because if you need to say quadruple your shutter speed because you're photographing wildlife and you don't,

want to change your aperture. Like let's say you're at f5.6, a very moderate aperture, and you're shooting at one over 100, but you're like, ⁓ I really need to shoot at one over 400th of a second to freeze the motion of this walking polar bear. So you can either go down two full stops in aperture, meaning from 5.6 to four and then four to 2.8. Well, A, 2.8 is a pretty shallow depth of field, so maybe that's not what you want artistically, or B, your lens doesn't let you go down to 2.8.

2.8 is a pretty fancy advanced piece of glass. It's an advanced lens. So here's where ISO comes in and it really is, it's a magic bullet. So every time you double your ISO from say 200 to 400 or 400 to 800, 800 to 1600, that's just doubling it. You are letting in twice amount of light and you're buffering in for that increase in shutter speed. So another example, cause I know these numbers are complicated, especially over, you know, a podcast and radio show. Let's say you're trying to go from one,

100th of a second to 400th of a second to freeze motion of an animal. That's four times. You then need to multiply your ISO by four times. So the same shot without changing aperture, if you go from 100th of a second to 400th of a second, you would then, if you're starting at let's say ISO 400, you then need to times it by four. So then all of a sudden, magically, you can go to 1600 ISO.

and your shot is the same, except you get this added benefit, this great benefit of dramatically increasing your shutter speed. And this works with the higher numbers as well. Let's say you're already shooting at 1 400th of a second, and you really need to go

to 1 1,600th of a second. You multiply it by four. Therefore, if you're at ISO, let's just say 800, you multiply that by four, you're at 3,200 ISO, and that's gonna give you the same exposure, the same shot, but all of a sudden it's gonna freeze motion. so it's a really, really amazing thing to see how ISO,

can give you that superpower to increase either shutter speed or aperture while not changing the lighting of your photo. Essentially, it's the same photo. Let's use an aperture example with ISO. So let's say you're in front of a mountain scene and the lighting is such that you are shooting at f4 and you're at f4 and ISO 200.

You don't wanna change your shutter speed, because it's fine, it's hand-holdable, but you really wanna get to F11. So that is going to be one stop to get you from F4 to 5.6, another stop to get you from 5.6 to F8, and then a third stop to get you from F8 to F11.

So that's two times two times two for ISO. So again, if you're at ISO, let's just say 200, that means doubling it once, 400. Doubling it twice, 800. Doubling it again, 1600. So to go from that shallow depth of field for maybe like a portrait type photo to a deep depth of field for a great landscape photo, all you gotta do is change the aperture and change the ISO.

and a photo stays the same in terms of lighting. You're not lighting or darkening it because your stops are balancing one another out. Super important concept.

So in summary, this triangle refers to not just the three really, really important parts of photography, but the fact that they're all balanced with one another. It's this balancing act between three things. Generally, I'm not changing all three at the same time. I'm really just trying to look at my scene and say, I want a deep depth of field, or I really need to increase or decrease my shutter speed based on the artistic scene in front of me. And I'm really messing around with just kind of two of the three, but you...

honestly can mess around with all three. A way that I do 99 % of my photography is on manual mode plus auto ISO. So that allows me to set the aperture, set the shutter speed, and then the camera chooses the ISO. But you're gonna find that even though the camera is in charge of this third element, it's doing the same calculations as I'm talking right now. And that might actually help you a little bit. But the key thing is that most of the artistic side of this golden triangle

is with the first two points. It's gonna be aperture and shutter speed. Once again, ISO is really just a means to an end. It's worth talking a little bit about what happens when you play with ISO too, too much. There is a downside if you go to what we call quote unquote high ISOs. And a high ISO is very subjective to your exact camera. This is all about the camera's sensor. Big, expensive, full frame cameras will have a higher tolerance where you can go to ISO 3200.

You can double it again to 6400. You can double it again to over 12,000, maybe even again to like 25,000. ⁓ You can do that with fewer issues in your camera, but the issues do start to emerge regardless. The issues are mainly noise and grain. noise and grain are really just like this.

this kind sandpapery feel to your photos. It degrades the quality. It gives you less editing capabilities. So on less expensive cameras, more introductory ones with smaller sensors, you really should try to go, dare I say not over 1600 if you wish to maintain decent quality. Cameras from 15 years ago, know, great fancy SLR cameras, you could barely go over 800. So if there's any way you put your money,

into photography and you're wondering, why am I buying a new camera body? Why is it so expensive? Why do I have to upgrade from a crop frame to a full frame? Honestly, probably the biggest reason is this ability to have high ISOs, which as hopefully you've learned today, gives you this magic bullet to increase your shutter speed dramatically if you need to, to freeze motion or increase your aperture dramatically in order to get a deep depth of field. Now, another thing we haven't talked about, but is actually the other in the spectrum.

you know, what happens if you're limited by light? What happens if you're shooting at dawn and dusk? So of course you can use ISO to your advantage. You can double it to give you another stop of light, which means that, you know, the photo appears brighter. This happened to me the other day with astrophotography. It was just way too dark. So I doubled my ISO, doubled my ISO. Then I dropped my shutter speed down, dropped my shutter speed down. And each time I'm doing that, I'm letting in twice as much light. And you'd be surprised how variable.

the amount of light you need in different types of scene can be. It's a huge, huge part of photography. So photographing at dawn in the Serengeti, you might immediately go out with an F4 aperture because that's gonna let in the most amount of light for your lens. Like let's say it can't go below an F4, it can't go to 2.8. You have a couple options. You can continually decrease your shutter speed.

Let's say you started off at one over a hundred, you can double the amount of light by going to one over 50. You can quadruple it by going to one over 25. But as you can imagine, you know, those are pretty slow shutters. That's not going to freeze motion of wildlife. It might not even freeze the motion of your hand holding the lens. So that's when we go to increase that ISO. If we're on a tripod, we may say, you know what, let's shoot on the lowest ISO possible because we're on a tripod in front of a static scene. And it doesn't matter if I'm photographing this mountain.

at one eighth of a second, because I'm on a tripod and the mountain's not moving. So you can see, I can keep my ISO low, I can get my shutter speed low, allowing me to have that really deep depth of field in my aperture. All three things are just so, so related. So in summary, this triangle refers really to the fact that it's a balancing act between these three things. There is no perfect association between all three. There's no perfect setting.

between all three for every mountain scene, for every portrait scene, for every wildlife scene. It's really just you and your artistic vision figuring out how fast do I need to stop motion? Do I want to intentionally add blur? Do I wanna have a shallow depth of field, a deep depth of field? And what is my tolerance for higher and higher ISOs? So if there's anything you take away from this beyond just the overall concept, I do think it's hugely valuable to sit down with an aperture chart

try to look at it, you know, obviously in an ideal world, like every day for a couple of minutes, but maybe it's just every, you know, every week for a couple of minutes and start to memorize those stops because it gives you really, really quick ability to adjust your photography. Again, 1.4 to two, two to 2.8 to four to 5.6 to eight to 11 to 16 to 22. Those are your stops. And then ISO and shutter speed.

Much easier because it's entirely numerical. So yeah, that was, ⁓ I feel like I got pretty into the numbers, but that's really what the golden triangle is about. You gotta know there's an association, but then the numbers are really what gives you the power to make those adjustments to not just create an artistic scene, but to capture what's really, really in front of you. So thanks so much for listening today. I would love if you were to check out my new photo website at shop.

courtwhelan.com that's just C-O-U-R-T-W-H-E-L-A-N. At very least, it's an awesome way to kind of get an inspiration of what you might like to shoot, places you might like to go, techniques that I'm using, whether it's silhouetting, whether it's intentional motion blur, you're gonna get to see a lot of examples there. And then one of the biggest ways you can help this podcast is if you would like to leave a review. You can leave up to a five star review, hint, hint, and a comment is even better. So if you like what you're hearing,

Consider leaving a review and better yet,

consider sending this to a friend, maybe forwarding it, sending it along, sending the link. The more people that get to know about this, the more people we have out there showcasing the beauty of our wild world, and ultimately being a big part of the conservation effort to save it. So once again, thanks so much and looking forward to talking to you next time.