Smart Photography

The book I read to research this post was Smart Photography: Get Off Auto Diane Griffiths which is a very good book that I downloaded from kindle. This book is part of a Smart Photography series. This particular book looks at the basic manual settings for a camera and does a good job of it. Shutter speed is like a window shutter and you vary the speed it opens and closes. Too fast a speed darkens an images and too slow blurs it. A fast speed is needed for something moving or bright. Aperture is like the pupil in the eye varying the light getting but never blocking it entirely. Higher numbers darken an image. ISO is a left over from film speed days and for normal use use 100. A dark image might require 400 or 800 like a cathedral interior. A high number can create noise in the image. Photos are normally taken as JPEGS but can also use RAW which gives more options when working in photo-editing software. It can also be used with things like HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography where several photos at different settings are combined to create a more complete one. The camera doesn’t have the light range of the human eye but this can be overcome in HDR Photography.