Weekly Reflection 4- The Three Musketeers

Weekly Reflection 4

3/ 3/ 2014

In this week, Dr. Jamalludin delivered an important lecture entitled as "The Three Musketeers" in the world of photography, which is known as the Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO. 

These three settings forms the foundation in this world and serves as the backbone to the body of photographing. In last week reflection, the preset mode, Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority were explained. These two settings are helpful for a beginner to start his photographic journey. As the journey goes on, mastering these settings by knowing how the changes of the settings affect one another guarantees a good and quality pictures to be produced. Thus, Dr. Jamalludin explained these settings which I summarized into these main points:

  1.   ISO

• I defined myself ISO as "Image Sensitivity Optics", which indicated the level of sensitivity of the optics of the camera to the light. ISO is usually represented in numbers such as 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and HI-ISO. The smaller the number, the lower the sensitivity of the optics to the ligh. A lower ISO is usually set under sun light or when the environment is bright to avoid the pictures to be over-exposed.

  2.   Aperture

• Aperture controls the size of the hole within the lens to limits the amount of light travels into the camera body. It also controls the depth of field, which is the portion of a scene that appears to be sharp in the picture. The aperture setting is usually represented by "f/" or "f-stop" which is known as "focal ratio" since the f-number is the ratio of the diameter of the lens aperture to the length of the lens.  The examples are f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/10, f/22. As the numbers become larger, the size of the hole becomes smaller, and the depth of field becomes larger, then the pictures are sharp everywhere. If we wish to produce a picture which focuses on a certain part while leaving the background to be blurred off, the aperture has to be small to open up the size of the hole to focus on that particular part and thus, the depth of field is small which emphasized on that specific area.

  3.   Shutter Speed

• As the name implies, this settings is related to the speed, or the length of time the shutter of the camera is opened to allow the light to travel into the camera body. Shutter speed is measured in fractions of seconds and represented as "1/" seconds. For examples, 1/250s means the shutter is opened for 1/250 seconds only. Thus, as the number of denominator increasing, the length of time becomes shorter, which the shutter will be shut off faster, and the light travels into the camera body will be lesser. A fast shutter speed is useful to freeze a motion of a moving object. However, it has to be advised that as the shutter speed increasing, it will produce a darker picture.

These settings can be best represented in the picture below:

Kruger-2-Kalahari (2008), The Three Musketeers

By changing these exposure settings, the light exposure level can be used as an indicator to the quality of the pictures:

Exposure Indicator

The exposure indicator has to be in the middle which is the exact exposure of the light to the camera to produce the best quality of the picture.

After knowing these three settings, it was time to put into practice. Dr. Jamalludin introduced to us a website to test our understanding on these exposure settings. The website is:

Exposure Exercise

I was grateful to be in this lecture as I really gained massive and useful knowledge today. To be excel in the world of photography with the passion of photography.