How well do you know your camera?

Oh, it rolls off the tongue : Digital Single Lens Reflex. The DIGITAL part is easy. The rest is less obvious. If you’re wondering why would we want to draw attention to the fact we have a SINGLE LENS, you need to go back to the time when what we now understand as the modern camera, was first invented and fitted with a mirror mechanism ( the REFLEX part) which allowed us to see exactly what the camera sees through the one lens. Before, you needed two optical light paths: one path through the lens to the film, and another path positioned above.

Aperture is a multi blade opening which can be widened or narrowed to regulate the flow of light into the camera and it is located in the lens. When you change your lenses, your aperture may change as well. We regulate aperture to have control over how many elements in the image will be captured in sharp focus and to create those lovely blurry backgrounds.

P mode is the most automatic of the creative modes but it gives us a greater degree of control than the full Auto ( green square). Whilst the camera remains in control of the aperture and shutter speed, you, the photographer can decide whether or not to use flash ( no auto flash pop-up), what metering mode to use, the ISO value or what focusing mode to select.

The answer is C – Depth of Field describes the area which will be in sharp focus in our photograph. When you focus on a particular object, a little bit in front of that point of focus and a little bit behind it will be in sharp focus, whereas anything behind and in front of this zones will gradually fade out of focus. The size of the area in sharp focus will depend on the aperture, proximity to the subject and the focal length.

You should always select the right focusing method to the right situation. With subjects moving towards you, you should use AI-Servo focusing mode (sometimes called Continuous Focus). Once your camera locks focus on your subject, and as long as you keep the button half-pressed, it will continue following your subject’s movement, giving you a greater chance of capturing the subject sharp. Bear in mind it’s not foolproof and some cameras handle it better than others.

The Matrix ( in Nikon cameras) or Evaluative ( in Canon cameras) metering mode is represented on picture  a). The camera will segment the frame into several areas, measure the light in each of them and create an average which should allow for most of the elements in the picture to be well exposed. Great for shooting landscapes or larger scenes, less useful in strong contrasting light.

A nifty little setting called Exposure Lock allows you to make sure that the camera reads light from a particular part of the frame and takes it as ‘baseline’ for the overall image. In the example above, we would lock exposure on the sky, then focus on our subject and take the photo. Although some additional tinkering may be needed, in most cases, the sky will be captured in all its glory and the subject will look like a silhouette.

False – the viewfinder shows you the view you would get at the widest available aperture. If you’re shooting a photo at a narrower aperture (wanting to preserve details all throughout the image) the level of detail/blur you’ll see through your viewfinder will be different to the outcome in the picture. Some cameras offer a “aperture preview” button which will allow you to view the actual outcome, but as default, you can only see the widest aperture view.

You increase the ISO (which is the measure of your camera’s light sensitivity) – by increasing your ISO by a stop ( so from 100 to 200, from 200 to 400 etc) you ask the camera to take the same, well exposed photo, just with half the light. So if you struggled to get a sharp, well exposed photo at 100 ISO, by increasing it to 400 or 800, or even higher, you can still take the picture, even in dim light. Word of warning – the higher the ISO, the more ‘grain’ you’re likely to have in your image.

This is an Exposure Compensation button. Under normal circumstances your camera is very good at determining the correct exposure for your image, allowing you to arrive at images that are neither too dark not too bright. But sometimes it gets confused (it doesn’t quite understand the brightness of the snow for instance) and you need to nudge it in the right direction. By applying Exposure compensation you trick your camera into believing that the perfect exposure should actually be brighter ( or darker) – you purposefully over or under expose your photograph.