How to use your camera

These days all cameras are capable of producing stunning images be it a smart phone or a DSLR costing £000’s. If the result is no good the answer probably lies behind the camera, not in it.

Don’t blame yourself though. The technology and controls of a camera are so complex and no training is given when the camera is purchased. Indeed given that most sales are now over the internet thats hardly surprising.

Reading the manual isn’t always the answer either. First you probably have to download it and secondly if you have no idea about cameras or photography the instructions could just as well be written in Chinese. (I know in some cases they are!)

So what I’m going to be doing in the occasional post is a “How to use your camera course for Dummies” (I’d probably get sued for using that title due to the range of training books using that strap line but at least it would get me plenty of publicity!)

I’ll cover everything from the basic settings, choice of shooting mode, thats the big knob on the top of the camera:  how to choose what to get the camera to focus on, what the technical terms mean – aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc. I’ll try NOT to use any jargon, not to assume any prior knowledge. I think thats were most help pages go wrong.

So if you have a shiny pristine camera that you really, really would like to use to greater effect follow this blog and hopefully I’ll be able to help you along the way. There’s other posts on here too about various aspects of my photography or photography generally so hopefully you will find something that entertains.

If you would like some help on any aspect of cameras or photography let me know. I can’t guarantee I can help but I’ll try!

So let start with some basic terminology.

In this day and age of automatic controls there’s no need to understand how a camera works to get acceptable results but to get exceptional results and to really enjoy the concept of taking photographs an understanding of the controls and ways of setting the camera up are a huge advantage so I’m going to attempt to help explain some of the more common settings which you should understand.

I’ll assume you know nothing so forgive me if some of what I say is not new but there’s nothing worse than assuming people have knowledge which is missing.

 

Lets start by describing what you can control and why you would want to and then we can move back to those settings which control them.

Any photograph you take needs a certain amount of light – the correct amount of light – to hit the sensor to record the scene. (Hang on – sensor? whats that? That’s the surface inside the camera that reacts to the light falling on it and records the picture.)

We have three ways of controlling the amount of light hitting the sensor, the size of the hole through which the light passes in the lens – that’s called the aperture – the length of time that the aperture is allowing light to pass through, that’s called the shutter speed and the sensitivity of the sensor to light – that’s termed the ISO rating. ISO stands for International Organisation for Standardisation (originally in French so letters are in the wrong order!)absolutely nothing to do specifically with photography but they are the initials which every photographer understands as meaning the speed of the sensor reacting to light.

So by controlling any one or all three of those elements, aperture, shutter speed and ISO we can control how much light falls on the sensor. Why do we need 3 ways of doing this? Well, each element controls the total in a different way and will have an effect on the final image, I’ll come back to this in much more detail over the coming posts but basically you use the shutter speed to control the amount of movement you are showing, aperture to control the amount of the picture that is in focus and ISO to give you more options of being able to use the other two as you wish.

If this helps you to start to understand what your camera is doing, and how, then please  leave a comment or a like. In the next post I’ll start to explain in more detail and show you the effects these three settings can have on the final result.