What is exposure?

When you are shooting, it is very easy to focus all of your attention on your subject, and how you want to frame it. After all, your subject is what makes your photo, right? Only
partly.People often ask me, what do you like to shoot? For a while this question really confused me, until I realized that the answer for me is light. I like to shoot nice light. It
doesn't even necessarily matter what that light is bouncing off of. Light creates texture. Light and shadow together can create a sense of depth in your scene, or allow you to
control the viewer's eye, and controlling the viewer's eye is the essence of composition.
There is no photography without light, and the secret to controlling light is to understand exposure. Even if you are not well-versed in the history of photography, you have
probablyseen a lot of movies. Think about the strong shadows in a great film noire movie--so named because the images had lots of war or black in them. Or think of the rich
colors and the dramatic lighting as the hero rides off into the sunset in the classic western. These are all moods and atmospheres that are created through lighting and exposure.
Movies are a photographic process, after all, and cinematographers have to know the same exposure theory that we photographers do. So what exactly is exposure? Let's go
outside for a minute. You have probably experienced this. Ah! You step outside, and it's too bright until your eyes adjust. Now you probably also experienced this. I step into a
dark room, and I can't see anything until my eyes adjust. That's exposure.
The pupil in my eyes, the black part, is an iris that can open and close to let in more or less light. That takes a certain amount of light for me to be able to see. So when I am in a
dark room, my pupils are opened very wide to let in enough light for me to see. When I stepped outside, my pupils were still opened very wide, so wide that I couldn't see,
because my vision was overexposed. All I could see was white. Now, when that happens to you, you may not think of it as seeing white, probably because you are more focused
on the pain as the nerves in your eyes gets overloaded.
But to sum up, when I am in one situation, my eyes need a particular setting. When I take those same eyes into a very different lighting situation, that setting is no longer correct,
and I can't see. That may sound familiar to you, not just because you have eyes, but because that's how your camera works. It needs different exposure settings, depending on
how bright or dark the light in your scene is. Like your eye, inside your camera's lens there is an iris, or aperture, that can be opened or closed to let in more or less light. But
your camera has an additional mechanism for controlling light, in the form of a shutter.
It's a little curtain that can be opened and closed quickly or slowly to let in more or less light.And that's all exposure is, controlling the amount of light that gets to the image
sensor in your camera. Too much light, and your image will be overexposed. It will be too bright. Highlight details will be lost to complete white. Colors will be washed out. Too
little light, and your image will be underexposed. It will be too dark. Shadow details will be lost to complete black. Tone and color will be dull and dingy. Now, you might be
wondering why your camera has two mechanisms for controlling light when your eye can get away with just one.
The answer to that is complicated, and we will explore it in detail throughout this course. Right now, know that the practical upshot of having two controls in your camera, and the
reason that you want to learn more about them, is that they provide you a tremendous creative possibilities. So we learn exposure theory not just to ensure that our images are
neither toobright nor too dark, but to expand the creative palette that we have at our disposal when we are shooting. We are going to be learning a lot of numbers, and concepts,
and terms in this course, but in the end your eye and your lens are both optical devices, so a lot of what we are going to learn is going to feel familiar to you, because you already
have a lot of experience with a pair of lenses and apertures that you use every single day.
What is a camera?
Your digital camera is a marvel of 21st century engineering, but if you could somehow strip away all of the automatic features that are just there to make it easier to
use-- autofocus, autometering, the LCD screen, the electronic shutter control, all the rest of that stuff--you'd still be left with a functional camera, because at the most
fundamental level, camera technology has not changed since the 1850s. All cameras are built on the same fundamental chassis, a lightproof box with a hole in the side.
One of the earliest such devices was the camera obscura, a darkened room with a hole in one wall. Now, because of the physics of light, a scene outside the room is
projected through the hole upside down on the wall opposite the hole. Of course, the camera is no good without a way of recording an image, and with a camera obscura, this
was pretty easy. You just stuck a Dutch master in the room and he traced the projected image onto paper. With the invention of chemical photography, it became possible to
shrink the camera obscura down to the size of a box, and that's what I have here.
This may look like just a cardboard box that's been wrapped with black electrical tape, but it's actually a camera. This is a pinhole camera, which I made by taking a cardboard
box and wrapping it with black electrical tape. It's a completely lightproof box, and in the back I've placed a piece of film. This is one of the things that's kind of a drag about a
pinhole camera is that you take a shot when you want to take another, you got to open it up and put another piece of film in the back. On the front, I have a shutter just like in my
normal camera. It's a little flap that I can open and close, and I've got a piece of aluminum that I punched a pinhole into.
Now again, this is just something to do with optics. When I open the shutter, light gets passed through that little pinhole and projected upside down onto the back of the box. So
to make an exposure, I set the camera up, and I have to try and guess where I think the framing is, and I have to calculate an exposure by hand, and once I have done that,
holding the camera very still, I lift the shutter up, and I keep it open for a long, long time. The pinhole camera can be greatly improved on with the addition of lenses and all of the
other automatic stuff that you get in a normal camera.
The lens gives you shorter exposure times, the ability to focus more light, the ability to shoot in lower light. This, of course, is how film cameras have worked for the last 150
years. With digital cameras, the piece of light-sensitive film that's inside the camera body was replaced with a light- sensitive image sensor, and a lot of fancy gear was stuck to
the outside of the camera. But the basics of exposure in your digital camera remain exactly the same as they do in a basic pinhole camera. As you discovered earlier, exposure
is the process of controlling how much light hits the image sensor, and your camera has two mechanisms for controlling light: the shutter and the aperture.
The shutter
As we discussed earlier, your camera has two mechanisms for controlling light: it has a shutter and an aperture. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the shutter. A shutter
is simply a mechanism that allows you to control how long the image sensor will be exposed to light, or film, if you're shooting with a film camera. Shutter speed is pretty
intuitive. As the shutter is open longer, more light will strike the image sensor, and your image will get brighter and brighter. Let's go back to the pinhole camera that we looked at
earlier. On the pinhole camera, this is the shutter, this little door here that I opened.
When I open it light is able to pass through the pinhole and expose the film that's in the back of the camera. So, to control shutter speed, I simply hold this door open for a longer
or shorter time. Now because the sensor on your digital camera is so sensitive, and because you've got a lens to focus light onto it, your digital camera needs much
shorter exposure times than this pinhole camera. So short, in fact, that a door like this one is impractical, because there is just no way to swing it all the way open and closed
quickly enough to get the short exposure times that your digital camera needs.

So the shutter on your SLR, and on some point- and-shoot cameras, is composed of two curtains. When you press the shutter button, the first curtain begins to slide open,
and then almost immediately the second curtain begins to slide closed. This creates a thin slip that passes in front of the image sensor, exposing it to light. I actually have a
video of this happening, but before we watch it, there is something you need to understand about your SLR.SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex, meaning the camera has just one
lens, and this is it, the big lens that's on the front of your camera.
Your image sensor is right back here. So, it's a pretty straight shot through the lens to the image sensor. That part is pretty easy to understand. The tricky thing about an SLR is
that your viewfinder is up here, above the lens and above the image sensor. And yet you're still able to look through the same lens that is exposing the sensor. How does that
work? It's all done with mirrors. If I take the lens off, you'll see inside that there is a mirror at an angle here.So light comes through the lens, bounces off that mirror, and goes
straight up into this part of the camera.
This is called the pentaprism. It's a prism or in some cameras there is series of additional mirrors that then bounces the light straight back out through the viewfinder. So as long
as this mirror is down, light coming through the lens goes up into the pentaprism and out the viewfinder, so I can effectively look through the lens. When I press the shutter
button though, the mirror flips up, so that now light is going straight back, and the shutter happens. Let's take a look at that in this video. You can see the mirror flipping open, a
shutter opening and closing.
Let's take a look that again. So you can watch that mechanism on your own camera. Just take the lens off the camera and press the shutter button. The shutter curtains will
move far to fast for you to see though, but you'll be able to see them in mirror flip up and down. Now point-and-shoot cameras don't always have a physical shutter the way an
SLR does. Sometimes instead of physical shutter, they just turn the sensor on and off for the length of the desired exposure.For different lighting situations you, or your camera,
will choose to have the shutter open longer or shorter.
Now obviously in less light it will need to be open longer, while in bright situations you will want it open shorter. Shutter speed is measured in seconds, and because shutter
speeds are usually very quick your shutter speed will almost always be a fraction of a second. Your camera provides a range of shutter speeds, and these are the
standard speeds that you will find out on all cameras. Shutter speeds can also be very long. If you're shooting in extreme dark, you might have shutter speed that are seconds,
minutes, or even hours long. So shutter speed is fairly intuitive, as is its effect on your image.
But your shutter is not the only mechanism for controlling how much light hits your sensor. As you saw earlier, like your eye, your camera also has an aperture.
Exposure defined
Alrighty, let's recap. You can speed up and slow down shutter speed to let more or less light to the image sensor, and you can open and close the aperture to let more or less
light to the image sensor. Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second, while apertures are measured in ratios, called f-stops. Together, these two numbers, shutter
speed and aperture size, comprise an exposure setting. A faster shutter speed allows less light to pass to the image sensor, as does a smaller aperture.
Now believe it or not, if you are clear on this, you already understand the fundamental components of basic exposure. Really, this is it. When you or your camera manipulates
exposure, all you are doing is changing these two values: shutter speed and aperture. With them, you can control how much light strikes the image sensor, and therefore, how
bright or dark the image is. So, why are there two mechanisms for controlling the light that strikes the image sensor? The answer to that is somewhat complicated, but the good
news is that the answer involves you, as a photographer, gaining a tremendous amount of creative control, and that is what the rest of this course will be about.
Pressing the shutter button
It's time to discuss how to press the shutter button on your camera. Now I know that may sound a little patronizing, particularly when I talk like this. But it turns out that that
simple button press triggers a fairly complex chain of events, and you need to be aware of those events when you press the shutter button. If you don't understand everything
that happens, you could miss shots, or end up with images with bad exposure or bad color. So, to work through what we're going to cover here, you first need to switch your
camera to program mode.We covered mode changes earlier, so you should be comfortable with this.
In the days of all manual photography, before you took a shot, you framed it, then you focused, then you dialed in your exposure settings, and it was only after doing all of those
things that you could take a shot. You still have to do about all of those things, but the good news is that your camera can probably do them for you, and it probably does a very
good job.The way you start this process is to press the shutter button down halfway. Now, if you take a moment now to feel your shutter button, and I mean feel what happens
when you press it, you'll find that it is pressing it all the way down, but then there is also a halfway point, a little stop that you can feel.
When you press to this point, you're telling the camera to start working on all of those decisions that need to be made before it can shoot. The first decision is autofocus. When I
press halfway, my camera's autofocus mechanism springs into action and calculates focus.Next, a light meter in my camera measures the light in the scene and calculates the
shutter speed and aperture that'll give me a good image for that particular light. That is, an image that's neither too bright nor too dark. Now finally, the camera also calculates
white balance. This is a process that will improve the chances that the colors in my scene will look correct.
Now this is all a fair amount of work, and it can actually take some time, especially if you're trying to focus in low light. Well, once it's made all of these decisions, your camera
will beep at you and possibly flash a little light in the viewfinder. This lets you know that all the necessary preparation is done, and you're ready to shoot. Now, you press the
shutter button the rest of the way, and the camera takes the shot. Now it's absolutely critical that you always half-press, hold there, wait until the camera says it's ready, and then
press the rest of the way.
If you just mesh the shutter button down all the way, the odds are you're going to miss your shot, because your camera has to chug through all of those steps before it can take
the picture. It's a much faster than you would be doing it if you were doing it yourself, but it still takes some time for your camera to do this. If you've experienced that problem of
trying to capture a particular moment, and you press the button, and the camera doesn't take the picture when you thought it was going to, that's probably because you've
mashed it all the way down.So if you're not already used to this process, then you need to start practicing it, because this half-press step is going to be critical for some of the
more sophisticated light metering that we'll be doing later.

Autofocus, metering, white balance, these are all complex operations, and we're going to talk about all of them in great detail as we continue.
Autofocus
As you may recall from high school biology class, there are two types of light-sensitive cells in your eye: rods and cones. Codes are the color-sensitive cells and most of the
cones in your eye are gathered into a very small area at the back of your eye, called the fovea. The fovea is responsible for the focused part of your field of view. Now it is not
immediately obvious, but the only part of your field of view-- that is, the only part of all of the stuff that you can see-- the only part that is in focus is an area roughly the size of the
tip of your thumb when held at arm's length.
That is this little bit right here. Now if you don't believe that, give this a try. Get a piece of paper that has some text on it, tear a page out of a magazine or just use a book or
something.Hold it at arm's length and put your thumb in the middle of it. Now, focus your eyes on your thumb, and with your peripheral vision try to read the text that's around
your thumb. You should find that you can't, that it is completely out of focus. Take your thumb away, and what was underneath your thumb is in focus. Since only a small part of
your field of view is in focus, you subconsciously move your eyes around to sample different areas of your field of view, and your brain assembles this into a big image that gives
you a sense of an overall impression of focus.
But when it comes time to closely examine something, like reading text on a page, then you actually look at that thing, and you focus your eyes. In other words, you choose
which part of your field of view that you want to focus on. Now your camera's autofocus mechanism is very similar in that you must choose where you want it to focus. Choose
the wrong place, and your subject may be soft or blurry. Now earlier we discussed the importance of half-pressing the shutter, but this is such an important topic I've decided to
nag you about it some more, before we launch into a discussion how to use the focus points that appear in your viewfinder.
So if you look here, you will see that we built a simple little scene here, some nice old, antique cameras. And my digital SLR is pointed at that scene. Now what this big thing is
here, this monitor, we have taken a video feed out of my camera, and so what you are seeing here on the screen is what I would see in my viewfinder. This is going to allow you
to see exactly what I am seeing when I am shooting. So I am going to do what I am supposed to do and press the shutter button halfway down. When I do, my camera
calculates, auto focus, it meters the light in my scene, it calculates a white balance. When it's done it, it beeps, and it flashes a light in the viewfinder, and most importantly, there,
it has done it.
You can see--oops, wrong finger-- you can see right down here it has calculated a shutter speed of a third of a second, an aperture of about 4. Now it has also turned on a
bunch of lights in my viewfinder. Your viewfinder may not look exactly like this. What each one of these squares is is a different point that the camera can choose to auto focus,
and you can see these ones that are lit up in red are where it has chosen to focus. They are all sitting on top of this antique slide projector, and so I know that the camera is
choosing to focus on my subject. That's great! When you stop to think about it, you'll realize that auto focus is a very difficult thing to pull off.
In any given scene, like this one, there might be a lot of things that could be the subject of the image. The auto focus system has to try figure out what thing in the scene is
supposed to be the subject, and then it has to drive the lens to focus on that thing. This is why individual camera vendors tout their specific autofocus mechanisms: it's a really
hard thing to engineer.Now in this scene we got a pretty simple situation, because our subject, the slide projector, is in the very center of the frame, so all of the focus lights that
lit up were right there in the center as they were supposed to be. Let's look at what happens if we go to a more complex scene.
Okay, check out our new scene here. We've placed three antique cameras in the front of a scene, and we have got the old slide project in back. Now the important thing to
remember about autofocus is that when you half- press that shutter button to focus, your auto focus system does not pick a particular object to focus on. In the last example, it
didn't say oh, there is a slide projector. I'll focus on that. It picks a depth to focus at. So watch what happens when I half-press my shutter button to focus. It's lit up a focus point
on this camera and this camera and this camera and the front of the table.
In other words, it's lit up points on any thing that's at the distance that it has chosen to focus on. Let's look at this a little closer here. This camera, this camera, this camera, and
the front of the table all sit on this plane right here, and that's the distance that the camera has chosen to focus at, so all of these things will be in focus. That thing back there is
behind that plane of focus, so it is not going to be in focus. One of the most important things to remember about your autofocus system is that it chooses to focus at a particular
distance and lights up the point on the object that is at that distance.
Therefore, when you press the button, you need to be really careful to check that your subject has a focus point lit up on it. If this was lit up, I would have bad focus. These are lit
up on what I want to actually be in focus in the image, so I am in good shape. Something else to know is that there will be times when your autofocus system picks the wrong
thing. On a lot of cameras, you can work around that by simply pressing the shutter button again--see how it has picked some different points here. I can press again, and it
gives me different sets. So that allows me to quickly try, or quickly get access to some different focus points.
These are the basics of autofocus, but your camera probably has many more auto focus features in there, some other auto focus techniques that are good to know about, and
you can learn about all of those in the "Foundations of Photography: Lenses" course.
Light metering
First and foremost, good exposure is about capturing an image that has the right level of brightness. As you have seen, you can control how much light hits the image sensor
bychanging your camera's shutter speed and aperture. As more light hits the sensor, your image gets brighter. But how do you know how much light is enough? After all, there
are lots of shutter speed aperture combinations to choose from, and there are a lot of different lighting conditions in the world. Fortunately, to ease the whole exposure problem,
your camera has a light meterwhich can measure the light in your scene.
Unless you are in manual mode, every time you have press the shutter button, the camera measures the amount of light in the scene and then calculates a shutter speed and
aperture combination that will yield good exposure. Once it's calculated these values, it displays them in the camera viewfinder as pair of numbers. Shutter speed is usually on
the left, aperture is usually on the right. Now, try this with your camera. Put it in program mode and go to a room that has a window on one side. Point the camera out the
window and half-press the shutter button.

Note the shutter speed and aperture values that are displayed after the camera meters. Now, point the camera in the opposite direction, towards the wall opposite the window.
Half-press the shutter button again and note the numbers that are displayed this time. They should be different, and this should make sense to you. When you are pointed out
the window in the daylight, the camera needs one set of exposure values to get a good image. When you point back into the room, where it's darker, it needs another set. As you
saw earlier, this is just how your eye behaves when light changes.
Even if it's night out, this should still work, as the view outside the window is probably darker then what's in your house. So as you can see, the exposure numbers that are
calculated are a direct result of type of lighting your scene. There is a shutter speed and aperture value, and together they control how bright or dark your final image is. Now, I
have been teasing you with the ideas that these controls give you more then just overall brightness control, and now we are finally ready to talk about how.
White balance
Because this is a course on exposure, the majority of our concerns are going to be whether our bright things are bright enough without being too bright, and our dark things are
dark enough without being too dark. However, exposure does have an impact on color, as we'll see later.More critically though, the color in your image is impacted by
something called white balance.You heard me mention that term while we have been talking about what happens when you half-press the shutter button, so we are going to take
a quick look at it now. This is just going to be a cursory discussion because I don't want us to get to sidetracked from exposure. But we'll be returning to white balance in detail
later.
The simplest explanation of white balance is that there are different types of lights and each of these different types of light has a different color characteristic. To get accurate
color in your images then, your camera has to be calibrated to the type of light you are shooting in. White balancing is the process of calibrating your camera to the
color characteristics of your light source. When white balance is off, you can end up with color that's pretty wrong, like this.Obviously, this is not a look that you usually want, and
you'd be pretty disappointed if you came home with a bunch of images with this much blue.
While your camera has a lot of different white balance controls, it also has an auto control. In most cases, auto will give you correct color, like this. So right now I just want you
leave your white balance set on auto. If you are not sure how to do that, check your camera's manual, under white balance. Later, we'll look at white balance in more detail and
discuss when you might want to switch off of auto, and why.
Shooting sharp images
As a photographer, an understanding of exposure brings you many advantages. First and foremost, it helps you guarantee that your images will be sharp. Very often in classes,
I'll see students come back with images that are soft, or outright blurry. "My camera is not focusing right," will be their immediate conclusion. But more often then that, the
problem is not on a focus, but of shutter speed. You know that with a higher shutter speed, the shutter stays open longer, so a shutter speed at 1/30th of the second means the
shutter stays opens twice as longas it does when set at 1/60th of second.
Now, if there is something in the frame that's moving while the shutter is open, then there is a good chance that thing will appear blurry in your final image. If your shutter speed
is fast enough, then a moving object can be frozen, but if the shutter speed is too slow, then you might see some smearing and blurring. Now what you have to remember is that
if a shutter is open, and the camera moves, you will get the same smearing and blurring, but it will be of your entire shot. In other words, camera shake can make your image
appear out of focus, and shakiness is more of a problem when shutter speeds are slow.
Now there are times when your camera may not focus right--or more likely, that you are not using your camera's autofocus mechanism properly. So if you come home with an
image that's soft, how do you tell if the problem was camera shake or a focusing problem? The woman in this image is out of focus, and in this case, the cause is the focusing
problem. How do I know?Because the background behind her is in focus. This is a case where the autofocus mechanism decided that the background was the subject, and
because I wasn't paying attention to which focus point it selected, I didn't notice that she was not chosen the subject.
Here she is again, and again she is out of focus, but this time our problem is camera shake, which you can tell because the entire frame is soft. So, now we get to your first
applied exposure lesson, which is going to be learning to prevent camera shake by becoming somewhat obsessive about shutter speed.
Taking control of shutter speed
We've covered a lot of material so far, a lot of basic theory, and some important habits that you'll need for the rest of your photographic career. We're now about to move on to
more artistic uses of exposure control. So let's take a moment to recap. You've seen that the shutter is a pair of curtains that sit in front of your image sensor. When you press
the shutter button to take a picture, the first curtain opens to expose the sensor, and then the second one follows to stop the exposure. You've seen that shutter speed is
measured in seconds, usually fractions of asecond--though it is possible to have exposure times of minutes or hours or even days, if you're shooting in extremely low light.
And you've seen that with slower shutter speeds, it's possible for a shaky camera to blur your image. Therefore, shutter speed is crucial for shooting sharp images that are free
of handheld shake. This understanding of shutter speed and the effects of camera shake should help you come home with far fewer blurry images. But now it's time to consider
how you can exploit the fact that a slow shutter speed can lead the things in your frame being blurry. By intentionally choosing a fast or a slow shutter speed, you can opt to
render moving objects in your scenerazor sharp or smear them blurry.
This allows you to create a dynamic sense of movement, or to freeze an action- packed moment of time for razor-sharp observation. This is the beginning of the creative
possibility of exposure. To exploit this motion-controlling power, you need to know how to select a specific shutter speed, and your camera probably offers you many controls for
doing this.