The Silent Room

Because I’m like, so freaking nice, and that I see more and more people giving honest attempts at photography, I’ve decided to do you a little favour by giving you some hints, tips and tricks to shoot better photos for your blog. But I can’t do it by simply feeding you pointers and what not. You might not be able to identify what trick is for what and when to use it.

So to make things simple for you, I will look at mistakes and shortcomings of several different situations and address each of them as to make a shot look good. But first, I will need you to understand how your camera works and its various settings [if available]. Don’t worry if your digicam lacks any manual functions, it should have at least the few basic elements which I will explain as easy as I can. I will first address the first and most common problem of all, and that is shooting in low light conditions.

Shooting Indoors/Nighttime
A common problem when shooting indoors and/or nighttime is camera shake. Sometimes you can get a focused image, but you get trails of motion blur. Sometimes when even you use flash, you still get the motion blur [like the picture below].

This simply happens because the shutter opens for too long and the camera [or subject] is moving. An easy way to think about shutter speeds is to think of a water tap.

Turning the tap allows water to pass through, right? So, if you open it for 1 second, let’s say you get a certain amount of water. Open it for 1/2 second, and you get less. Open it for 2 seconds and you get more.

Instead of a tap that lets water through, the camera shutter opens and lets light through. The longer it opens, the more light goes in and likewise.

In low light conditions, cameras would normally leave the shutter open longer to let more light through, otherwise, the picture would be too dark. However, there is a major flaw in this. When the shutter opens, it records whatever it ‘sees’ while its opened. So if the camera [or the subject] moves, it will be recorded as a trail of motion blur. Like the picture below;

The longer the shutter opens, the longer and more obvious this motion blur gets. Which also means, if it opens for a shorter amount of time [a faster shutter speed], you get less motion blur [remember the flow of water?].

But in the dark, if not enough light passes through, the image will be dark, right?

Yes, that’s right, you’re catching on quick! Since we have solved the problem of motion blur, let’s solve the problem of a dark image. When we talk about an image’s brightness or darkness, we’re talking about its exposure to the light. Now, we’re going to do this a bit slowly, so stay with me!

A slow shutter speed, exposes an image to light for a longer period of time. [more light, more bright]
A fast shutter speed, exposes an image to light for a shorter amount of time. [less light, less bright]

An image with the right amount of brightness and darkness is properly exposed.
An image that is too bright is OVER exposed.
An image that is too dark is UNDER exposed.

HOWEVER

There is one more thing that determines whether or not an image is properly exposed. To keep things simple, let’s just call it a camera’s ISO rating. Let’s think back to the tap water. Think of ISO as something that absorbs the water from the tap.

A higher ISO means it sucks up more light, like a sponge.
A lower ISO means it sucks up less light, like an A4 paper.

So, if you open the tap for 1 second, the sponge [higher ISO] will absorb more water than the paper [lower ISO] right? The same goes for a digicam, but in this case, its the shutter speed [instead of the tap], the ISO [instead of the sponge] and light [instead of water].

So, I’m sure you can see a simple pattern here. You can get the same amount of exposure in low light conditions if…

High ISO and Fast Shutter

OR

Low ISO and Slow Shutter.

Easy, right? Now that you have understood the concepts, let’s see how you can get your camera to do the same in a room it with only one flourescent light;

1. Turn off the camera flash [I will explain this later], and set the ISO rating higher.

HINT: Make sure you’re not in full automatic mode, because that would not let you do any settings whatsoever.

2. ISO ratings for most digicams are rated at 50, 100, 200 and 400. Try setting it to ISO 200 or 400.

3. If your camera has ‘Shutter Priority Mode’ then use it and turn your shutter speed to 1/20 or 1/30 seconds. If it doesn’t, see if it has an ‘Exposure Value’ [EV] setting.

HINT: EV is simply the camera’s way of measuring an image’s exposure [see above]. It is measured in steps, from -2 to +2 [-2 is maximum under exposure, and +2 is maximum over exposure]. Don’t be afraid to play with these settings.

4. Now that your ISO is set high, turn down the EV by -1/3 of a step. This will force the camera to under expose the image i.e. increase the shutter speed.

5. And you’re set. Point at your subject, press halfway to focus, reposition your image and press it full to shoot!

HINT: Use a centered focal point. Aim the focus point at the subject, focus, and readjust the image to position your subject for a nicely composed shot!

Ta-dah!

But wait, what about the camera flash?

Good question! Remember how we wanted to avoid motion blur using fast shutter speeds, but suffer from under exposure? A flash helps to avoid under exposure by providing the subject with a great amount of light for that short moment.

Like, say, the water just now. You open it for only 1/2 second and get a few drops of water, but you pour another glass of water onto the sponge [or paper]. That’s exactly what the flash does.

This is no problem if the subject is about a metre or more away from you. But what if its closer? What if its against a shiny glass wall? You don’t want to get ugly flashburns like these;

That’s why we turn off the flash and let the natural colours do their job :)



That’s all for the first tutorial. All the best, and keep on shooting! Oh, and if you tried out what you learned from here, show me your pictures and share the knowledge with your friends!