Photography
28-01-2016

A Better Understanding of Exposure 

Olympus Pen FYesterday saw the super exciting release of a new Olympus Pen camera, the Pen F. Modelled on the 1963 rangefinder Pen F it has a built-in viewfinder, 20 megapixels and amazing added features like adjusting hue & saturation of individual colours. It’s highend kit with a price to match. But more on that soon! At the Design Museum launch, I cornered my pal Jay to clear up my exposure confusion… 

Which was this… I wanted to know why when on full manual, the only way to adjust the exposure (by which I mean – mistakenly, I now realise – the exposure value which reads eg. 0.0 on the camera screen) you could only do so by adjusting the Shutter Speed and Aperture.

Jay looked at me aghast until after my muddled explanation we got to the bottom of it.

When shooting in A (Aperture only) which I mainly do, you are given the option (as well as setting the aperture plus the ISO etc) to move the 0.0 value up and down – I usually move this up to 0.7 for lighter, brighter pictures. So I was confused when in manual why I couldn’t do the same directly; to get it to 0.7 I had to adjust the aperture and shutter speed.

My misunderstanding lay in counting the exposure value as another element to be adjusted in addition to everything else when in fact it is the sum of everything else. What you do with aperture and shutter speed is create the exposure value.

Being able to adjust the Exposure in A (Aperture only) is basically quite misleading – for me, at least! – as it doesn’t give you a true understanding of what is actually happening.

So there you have it. If like me, you were wondering about that, I hope I’ve cleared things up. And perhaps made going Manual a little less overwhelming. But I’m guessing you may well have known all this, and I’m the dunce! #liveandlearn #stilllearning etc

Shooting on Manual, you adjust the Shutter Speed (250 value) and the Aperture (F1.8 value) to create the Exposure value (1.0 - a bit high!)
Shooting on Manual, you adjust the Shutter Speed (250 value) and the Aperture (F1.8 value) to create the Exposure value (1.0 – a bit high!)
On Aperture, the camera lets you adjust the Aperture (F1.8) and the Exposure value (1.0 - this is what confused my understanding!) and decides the Shutter Speed and Aperture.
On Aperture, the camera lets you adjust the Aperture (F1.8) and the Exposure value (1.0 – this is what confused my understanding!) and decides the Shutter Speed itself.

Let me know if this was a useful post! And I can start looking at more photography aspects in layman detail! I’m thinking A Better Understanding of Shutter Speed, as this is an area I need to properly get to grips with…. 

Olympus Pen F Shot on the Olympus Pen F

Ps. In case you’re curious about the Pen F – which this picture was taken on! – go check out my Snapchat (@stylonylon) for an overview of what went down at yesterday’s launch… It’ll be in shops end of Feb and I’ll hopefully be able to review on the blog very soon!

Image credits: Jay McLaughlin (top), R. Cleveland Aaron  (bottom), rest by me!  

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4 Comments

  1. Ooo, shutter speed would be helpful. Just can’t get to grip with sharply focused moving objects/blurry background on manual (or any other setting come to that apart from sports mode). Your photography tips are so great and easy to understand, they’ve improved my pics no end. Oh and your explanation of bringing up the super control menu was a game changer. Love your photography, love your blog, fab.

  4. Thank you for that explanation. I was always confused as to what happened to the exposure control option whenever I set my camera to the manual mode. I am now at peace with this topic. 🙂

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