Kidz Photography

A site for kids to learn photography skills

Archive for April, 2009

Auto-exposure

Apr 28

Posted by admin in Tips

If your compact camera offers the feature of auto-exposure and you don’t feel like using the manual controls (or if you dont have manual controls) to adjust the exposure and there is a certain affect that you would like to achieve, you can still adjust it.

How?  By simply taking advantage of your auto-exposure. If you would like a lighter picture (a larger aperture and a slower shutter speed) then you would cover the lense of your camera with your hand or anything nearby for a few seconds, the camera will then set itself to a bigger aperture and a slower shutter speed, then move your hand away and take the picture. If you would like a darker image (a small aperture and a fast shutter speed) you would expose your cameras lense to the sun or to a light source for a few seconds, the camera will then set itself to a smaller aperture and to a faster shutter speed.

If you would like to use this trick successfuly, practice it a lot and also experiment for youself.

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Exposure

Apr 21

Posted by admin in Tutorials

Well, what is exposure? Exposure is how much light is exposed to the image-sensor.It is one of the most important aspects of digital photography because a good picture is one with the correct amount of light. If there is too much or too little light, the picture is not so good, is it?That is why exposure is so important.

Before learning how to control exposure you first have to know how a digital camera works and it’s layout.Behind the lense there is a shutter and behind that there is an image-sensor.There are two ways to control the amount of light that reaches the image-sensor.The first is to adjust the time the shutter stays open, e.g 1/8th of a second meaning a lot of light gets to the image-sensor or 1/250th of a second meaning only a little light gets to the image-sensor.The second way is to change the aperture.The aperture is a hole that its size can be adjusted, set between the lense and the shutter.Light that is coming through the lense is funneled through this hole,through the shutter and then to the image-sensor.So if you want lots of light you would make the aperture bigger.If you want less light you would make the aperture smaller.The size of the aperture is measured in f-stops e.g f2.8,f8.The higher the f-stop number the smaller the aperture.The lower the f-stop number the bigger the aperture. So f2.8 is a very big aperture meaning lots of light gets to the shutter, and f8 is a very small aperture meaning only a little light gets to the shutter.

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