- What are aperture, shutter speed and ISO? Aperture: controls the area over which light can enter your camera. Shutter speed: controls the duration of the exposure. ISO speed: controls the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor to a given amount of light.
- When would you need to change your ISO? The reason you should change your ISO is because you’re targeting a specific shutter speed.
- What is aperture and shutter priority settings? Aperture Priority (A) lets you choose the aperture (aka f-stop) setting you want, but the camera chooses the shutter speed. Shutter Priority (S) lets you choose the shutter speed you want, but the camera chooses the aperture setting.
- What are AF modes how do you change them? Set the lens to AF mode. Most brands have a button on the lens and the camera body to switch between AF and MF mode. Press the shutter button halfway down or the AF-ON button if you use back-button focus to focus on your subject.
- Why do your need to meter the light to get the right exposure? Incident light metering will give you consistently correct exposure results, because it won’t be fooled by subject reflectivity.
- What is white balance and why would you need to change it? It means that if you want to copy the white balance settings from one image and paste them onto another that was taken with a different camera make or model, your final images might not look the same.
- What is depth of field and what is the difference between shallow and good? Depth of field is the area of acceptable sharpness in front of and behind the subject which the lens is focused. A shallow depth of field refers to a small area in focus. Often the subject is in focus, while the background is blurred.
- What are drive modes and metering modes? The metering mode determines which areas of the frame are used by the camera to measure subject brightness and how the camera sets exposure.
- What is exposure compensation? Exposure compensation is used to alter exposure from the value selected by the camera, making photographs brighter or darker. In modes P, S, and A, the camera automatically adjusts settings for optimal exposure, but this may not always produce the exposure the photographer intended.