HOW TO USE YOUR DSLR

The 3 Fundamentals:

1. Shutter Speed
2. Aperture
3. Film Speed

Male Speaker: All right, I'm here to talk about shutter speed, aperture and film speed. These are the three fundamental things you need to absolutely know about your Digital SLR Camera, right when you get it. If you can master these things then you can take a picture right every single time as basically.

So let's go over shutter speed. Shutter speed is the duration of the curtain being opened. This is in front of your camera sensor. So I'll take this lens off, so you can actually see what the heck is going on. That's all shutter speed is. It's the length of how much, how the duration of when that thing flops up, it lets off a wide in, the sensor records all that light and then it shuts and then it saves the picture.

So I'll make the shutter speed longer, so you can see what that looks like. I'll make it 1.3 seconds. Then it's all recording the light then it stops. Then it's all the lights going in and then it stops again. So each of these three things that you are learning about right now aperture, shutter speed and ISO. They all have effects and side effects. So the effect of this is, it's brightness and darkness because the longer this is open, that time a bunch of light gone in and it was all coming in constantly when that was open. But if I shorten it up, that was really quick, so less light got in during that duration of when that curtain was up.

So therefore the image is also, it's just darker. However the side effect of shutter speed is motion blur. So if I had this shutter speed set to one second and I was moving my finger back and forth, what do you think is going to happen. My finger is going to be completely blurry because it's recording all of that light during that one second time period, but my finger is moving constantly.

So my finger is not going to look frozen in a picture, it's not going to be a freeze frame. It's going to be completely blurry. Now if I set it way down to a 400th of a second, I did the same thing. See how fast that was. That's going to freeze my finger, and it's going to be still and it's going to look normal. There is a lot of creative things you can do with long shutter speeds, but we'll talk about that in a different video.

Now let's move on to aperture. Now aperture is how the opening of your lens. How much light comes in through your lens. So that's a wide aperture, that's actually f/5.6 right there and then this is a very small aperture and that's probably f/32 or f/36 or something. And now as you can guess, it's pretty much the same effect of shutter speed, the -- when it's open more, more like it's in and when it's shut more less like it's in. However the side effect of aperture is called depth of field.

So when this is, and I'll explain this, when this is open all the way and if I take a picture of my finger right here and the focus point was on my finger and this is at f/5.6 and it was zoomed in all the way, let's just say. My finger would be crystal clear, but everything behind my finger and in front of my finger would be very blurry. That's what depth of field is, it's limiting your focus point into a certain point. However, if I took the picture and if it was at a very small aperture, the opening was very small, let's just say a high, that's a higher f number, so like f/22. My finger will be in focus and also more of behind my finger would be a little bit more on focus as well.

And now film speed. Film speed is the sensitivity of light to your image. So if I was at ISO 200, that's a very good ISO because there is -- when you're talking about ISO you have an effect and the side effect just like the other two fundamental principles we're talking about. So you really need to worry about the side effect and so the side effect is called noise. This is also known as grain. They differ a little bit, but noise is basically color grain. It's not good, so I will recommend always staying at the lower side, so you can when you're taking a picture.

However, this is sometimes not the case, because you're going to need to use ISO's higher to raise the brightness because the effect of ISO is yet again brightness and darkness. So effect of ISO 200 the image would be darker compared to effect of ISO 1600 it would be lighter. However effect of ISO 1600, there would be more noise introduced into the image because the effect of ISO 200, the noise will be cut down and it would be a much more clear, natural image. So that's basically the three fundamentals that you need to know about your Digital SLR Camera.

That's nice, but how do I adjust each variable?

Male Speaker: You might be asking yourself there are three variables, which one do I pick and how? Well, this is what the knob is here for there is automatic mode, which is fully automatic, it will adjust the shutter speed and the aperture for you. And P mode is exactly the same thing except there is no, the flash is excluded. So this little flash won't automatically pop up when it is P mode and this is what I usually use whenever I'm just casually taking pictures.

And then there is Shutter priority mode. Now shutter priority mode that will give you the control to adjust the length of the shutter speed and the camera will adjust the aperture for you. It will take these two variables and even them out until they're just right and then you get a properly exposed picture. The aperture priority mode is where you get a control the aperture. When you move the knob around, you're adjusting the aperture and the camera is adjusting the shutter speed for you. It will mix these two up. It will combine them and you'll get a properly exposed picture.

Manual mode is where you get to adjust the shutter speed and the aperture by yourself and the camera does nothing. So what situations do you want to use these different modes in. I would use P mode whenever you're just casually taking pictures. I would use shutter priority mode when you want to get a long exposure of say a Ferris wheel going around or if, there or you could also use shutter priority mode there is like a race car going by, and you wanted a short shutter speed and you wanted the camera to adjust the aperture.

And I would use aperture priority mode if you wanted to get like a really nice dreamy portrait, and if you wanted to get that really blurry background, you would go all the way down to f/1.8 you say, hey I'm just stick in there and I'm leaving the camera to do, to adjust the shutter speed to whatever or if you're taking a landscape, you would want to just bump it up to f/16 and then let the camera adjust the shutter speed for you. And if you're doing manual mode, this is very useful when you're doing stuff on a Tripod or if you're outside and you're taking really, if you're taking like night landscapes, then you could adjust the aperture all the way down and then you can adjust the shutter speed to a really long shutter speed and then you could adjust your ISO by yourself as well and bump it all the way up so now we're getting the maximum brightness as we can out of our camera. We got the widest aperture, the longest shutter speed and the most intense ISO.

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