Exposure in digital photography

Exposure can be explained as the amount of light permitted to enter and capture by the camera sensor or film. There are three factors that affect exposure. They are aperture, shutter speed and ISO which will be explained later.

Getting the right amount of exposure is not simple as it requires you to gauge the amount of light in order to properly expose a picture. As such the three factors that I mentioned earlier plays an important role in getting the exposure right. These three factors are inter-related such that adjusting the values of one affects the other two. Thus to properly expose a picture, you can play around with aperture, shutter speed and ISO.

Let me briefly explain what the three factors are as they will be covered in detail in later part:
Aperture: It refers to the size of the opening of the lense.
Shutter Speed: It refers to how long the shutter can be kept opened.
ISO: It refers to the sensitivity of the image sensor.

The good thing about digital camera is that you can gain experience in mastering exposure at little cost as the image produced are stored in memory card unlike film. Thus you can experimenting exposure by altering the ISO, aperture and shutter speed and see how the image turns out. Some cameras feature a manual mode (e.g shutter speed priority, aperture priority) whereby you can change the shutter speed and aperture to suit the lighting condition of the environment.

It is to be take note that mastering exposure can be achieved by constant practicing and learning how to adjust the right exposure to the right environment.

You may want to learn a rule on exposure compensation. This rule known as the Sunny 16 rule which is used as a guidelines on how to obtain a properly exposed picture.

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