Related web sites

As I find them, I will add relater web sites to this page.  Comments are welcome (via email), How to use manual mode on your camera, by Tony and Chelsea Northrup. Martin Bailey’s take on the Exposure Triangle CrashCoursePhotography.com — their take. Canon offers an interactive website on using manual mode in your (Canon) camera.…

Tertiary Effects

There are some third-order effects in the choices on the Exposure Triangle.  These are generally not considered to be part of the art of photography, but they are worth mentioning here, for completeness. The effects we will discuss here are “Rolling Shutter” (next), “Diffraction” and “Starburst.” Note: Most readers can skip this section and go directly…

Tertiary effects: Starburst

Another tertiary effect of aperture is in the creation of starbursts.  Some lenses are more susceptible than others to this effect, but the general idea is that one can get a pleasing (or not) starburst at smaller apertures.  Like this: Some photographers use this tertiary effect.  There are filters available that create starbursts at any…

Tertiary effects: Diffraction

Another tertiary effect that photographers are aware of is something called diffraction.  This occurs when you have a very small aperture—the light is actually diffracted by the iris in a way that can be seen in the photograph.  Generally, this effect is not desirable since it affects all the light in the image—nothing is perfectly…

Tertiary effects: Rolling shutter

As it turns out, most mechanical shutters actually sweep down the sensor, as opposed to sweeping left or right.  This is done partly to reduce the effect of rolling shutter (since the distance down the rectangular sensor is shorter than going side-to-side). The shutter is composed of a “first curtain” that drops down (exposing the…

Secondary effects: Bokeh (暈け)

Photographers have taken a word from Japanese, bokeh (暈け), pronounced “BOW-kah”), to describe the quality of the out-of-focus regions in a photograph.  Bokeh is roughly translated as “blur.” Photographers judge the quality of the bokeh in photographs.  Here is a comparison of three different lenses’ bokeh. Most people consider the left image to have the…

Secondary effects: Aperture

Once again, aperture is the hardest leg of the exposure triangle to understand.  Long story short: Large apertures tend to put the background out of focus; Small apertures tend to have more of the scene in focus. The flower on the left was shot with a large aperture, f/4.  The one on the right was…

Secondary effects: ISO

ISO is not too hard to understand: higher ISO values tend to have less detail than lower ISO values.  This lack of detail is manifested in noise: hard edges in a noisy image are not so hard.  Also, a solid surface will appear to be speckled. Modern cameras, especially ones made in 2014 and later,…