Digital Photography Digital Field Guide

Chapter 3. Photography Basics

In This Chapter

• Understanding exposure

• The three elements of exposure

• The role of ISO

• Understanding apertures

• Equivalent exposures

• Getting color right with white balance

• Getting good close-ups

• Composing great photographs

• Putting it all together

Digital cameras are great! The computers that are the brains inside these hunky little machines do a magnificent job of properly exposing and focusing photographs for you most of the time. But the key phrase here is "most of the time." When you point and shoot, your digital camera does not always get it right.

You need to know when and how to control your camera manually to make sure that the program inside your camera doesn't make mistakes. (Yes, you can be smarter than your digital camera!)

Understanding when and where your digital camera can go wrong, and how to fix the problem, requires understanding the basic principles of photography, which you learn all about in this chapter.

In addition to good digital cameras doing the wrong thing, there's another reason to learn the basics of photography: Good photography often goes beyond point-and-click. If you want to be the best photographer you can be, the more you understand about the basics, the better!

Understanding Exposure

Properly exposing a photograph is the most difficult technical challenge facing digital photographers. If a photograph is improperly exposed, it doesn't matter how wonderful everything else in the photograph looks: You might as well not have bothered taking ...