Enhancing photos with exposure and rendering techniques are no longer skills reserved for professional ‘shutterbugs.’ Worry over wasting exposures and paying for costly processing is eliminated, and amateur photographers are producing stunning photos with the occasional tweak of exposure settings.
Even inexperienced photographers understand that exposure settings adjust overall photo brightness. Cameras resemble the human eye and posses exposure settings, which control the amount of light entering them. The aperture, equivalent to the human iris, can be set wide for more light and narrow for less. The shutter, similar to an eyelid, will ‘blink’ fast or slow for lighter or darker photos.Never heard of this before? Get up to speed here. A camera’s sensitivity is comparable to human pupil contraction and dilation, letting in more or less light accordingly.
The brightness of surfaces in a shot varies, so exposure settings are adjusted to account for their relative brightness to each other. For example, when photographing a subject wearing a white t-shirt, standing in before a pale sky, exposure settings must be altered, enabling the subject to be visible.
However, these settings don’t only adjust overall brightness; they also offer the opportunity to get artistic with images. Faster shutter speeds freeze moving objects, and slower speeds create a motion blur, giving the photo dynamic appeal. Aperture settings have significant effect on depth of field in a photo. Narrow settings produce photos with the entire scene in focus and wide settings enable single subject focus. Adjust overall brightness of photos by ramping up sensitivity and fiddle with aperture and shutter settings to add interesting dimensions to your photos.