How to choose the BEST SHUTTER SPEED, APERTURE and ISO | Real life examples

a big thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video morning everybody fantastic to see you all again so in this video what i'm going to do is i'm going to talk all about how i actually take the photos so the camera settings that i use where i focus obviously i talk about those in other videos but i'm going to go into detail i'm going to show you exactly the things that i do to set up that shot you know i'll talk about the composition as well but i'm going to focus on things like aperture shutter speed um what iso i use whether i use a filter or not um and where i focus and what goes through my head when i'm actually choosing those settings because i get these questions asked loads and i know there's a lot of beginners out there that probably just don't know how to set these things up so hopefully after this video you'll have a better idea and i'm in my favorite location which is rydal water in the lake district and it's just an amazing morning it's a little bit cloudy but there's been some rain a bit of snow on the hills and it looks beautiful [Music] wow so this is um we just had some storms in the uk and you can see by this tree just how powerful they were it's incredible the power of the wind so many trees have come down so many houses and caravans have been ruined as well it's not great reminds you of the power of nature really is incredible [Music] okay so what i'm trying to do is just record this hut in the background and there's a few things to think about um around the settings of this and positioning of my camera so i just want to talk through in as much detail as i can really so first of all there was some really nice ripples on the water sods the wind um has started just as i've started recording which has changed these ripples which changes the actual shot that i'm going to take but the ripples at the at the bottom here so the ripples sort of down here where a nice part of the foreground and then the hut as the background and then i didn't want to get the sky in the shot so if i just walk up to my camera here to do that i had to have quite a long lens and i had to get the right height so i have got on here um my 70 i'm with my dad as well i'm with my dad and uh which is really good fun going on a shoot with my dad um anyway on to the camera so i've got my um 7200 lens here and that is meaning that i can get if you just look um here i've not got the sky in so first thing is that i haven't got the sky in and then you can see the ripples just at the bottom here i've got like a set of ripples in the shot so that creates a few technical difficulties because i'm shooting at about 90 millimeters obviously i want the hut in focus but i also want these ripples to be in focus as well you could argue that it doesn't matter for these ones at the bottom to be in focus but because it's an easy focus stack to do and what i mean by that is that this bottom part of the image here there's an easier line that i can disconnect it from the top part of the image then what i'm going to do is i'm going to shoot one focusing on the hot and one focusing down here at the bottom and um yeah it's just about timing it right really and and making sure that um i i get it when i think the ripples are most uh aesthetically pleasing and then the other thing to think about is shutter speed so i want a reasonably fast shutter speed so to get that um we'll just have a look at my settings i'll just go to the camera view and we'll look at the settings okay so to get the right shutter speed you can see that at the moment i've got um 1 25th of a second i think that's just about quick enough to get um the water frozen that's moving at the bottom here i don't want it to be blurred i'm shooting at f13 because i want to try and get as much in focus as i can and then i've also got iso 400 and i've got iso 400 because i want to get that fast shutter speed so basically what i try and do in it in a scene like this is my thought process is how fast do i need the shutter speed and and in that i worked out it was about 125th of a second that was through trial and error then i think what's my depth of field and that dictates my aperture and then i set my iso based on those two factors to ensure that i can get a fast enough shutter speed so it's it's just a process of going through those things think about your shutter speed first then your depth of field and then set your iso your iso really should be the last thing you set what you're trying to do to get the best shot is shoot at a low enough iso because obviously you're going to get less noise in the scene so i'm going to take the shot obviously i'll put all those settings up and point out exactly what i did and then we'll go and find another shot [Music] i caught a glimpse of you out on the road [Music] okay i found another composition this is lovely it's a scene i've been back to a few times actually and i always seem to not quite get the light ideally this will just have a little bit of fog or some nice light just raking through the scene but this flat light is also really good for shooting waterfalls because um you don't have to worry about shadows too much so basically i've got this in the background i'm shooting at 24 millimeters and i've got this tree in the foreground this tree in the foreground's a tricky thing because you wouldn't be able to focus stack this because it's quite complex so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just talk you through the settings i've got to avoid me having to focus stack this tree and make sure i get the whole scene in focus all the way from the tree here through to the waterfall right at the back and yeah we can look at photo pills as well [Music] what i want to do is just talk to you about the depth of field because this is really important in the shot like this you've got this tree here and you're thinking is it going to be in focus what aperture do i need to put it on so the first thing i'm thinking in my head here is how far away is the tree and what focal length i've got and focal length means such a big difference to depth of field so if you have it on 24 millimeters you're gonna have more in focus than if you have it on 70 millimeters and i've got it on 24 millimeters here and we've got this amazingly useful app called photopills so if i just show you this so what what i'm going to do is i'm going to first of all see what happens if i focus it on the waterfall the waterfall is about seven meters away so i've set at seven meters there and it's set at f eight um but i actually want to probably go to f 13 because i know that's as big a depth of field as i can get on this camera without it getting a little bit blurry with diffraction coming in so i've set it at f13 at 24 millimeters and that is going to tell me if i just go back to the start here that will tell me and i've just got it up here so you can see it so by focusing on seven meters away i've got all the way to infinity focus so all the way back to the end of the waterfall and the focus is going to drop to a point of acceptable focus of 1.25 meters which is way in front of this tree this tree is about three meters away now the point of acceptable focus i don't think super sharp so you need to go double or triple that so if i double that that's 2.5 meters so by shooting at f 13 focused on the water i'll get all the way back to the back of the waterfall and then to this tree now if it wasn't close enough if i wasn't focusing close enough to this tree then what i do is i just move my focus point a little bit closer put it in photo pills and hopefully hopefully then i'll be able to work out whether i i can get it in focus if the tree's too close to me and i have to focus stack then i'll just grab my tripod move away or try a different composition because it'll be difficult to do it you don't really want to go up to anything past f i don't think f sort of 15 16 get into f 22 and you get a lot of diffraction the whole thing is going to be soft and you're going to defeat the whole objective of what you're trying to do right that's a lot i'm going to take this i'll show you the settings i'll show you exactly what i did again just in case you missed any of that okay the other thing to add on this particular shoe is that i have got a polarizing filter on so i'm using a polarizing filter because i want to actually reduce the reflection of the water if i just show you the difference it makes so if i just put the polarizing filter on and you can see as i turn it here the water goes darker if you compare it to before when it wasn't so polarized it's quite light when i put it on it darkens the shot putting a polarizer on also reduces the exposure as well quite significantly so i've gone from an exposure of about half a second to an exposure about two seconds by putting the polarizer on so often a polarizer is just good enough to use without an nd filter and quite often i'll just use a polarizer if i know i've got to polarize the water i use usually only use a polarizer to polarize reflection of water or reflection of foliage good right i better get the shot it's um i think it's an interesting one it's quite a quite technical composition but i think it'll work i think it'll work i'm quite excited about seeing it [Music] so it's great fun taking those two shots especially being with my dad as well and him seeing how i do the videos um we didn't have the best conditions though uh there was no atmosphere and no light so really you need those to get a good shot but the whole point of the video and i hope you enjoyed it was um just to try and show you what i go through when i when i'm choosing settings on my camera and how i go about choosing those settings because often often there's a lot of things to think about and i try to explain it a little bit in in those two photos but um obviously there's a lot of different examples i can give you so what i want to do is i just want to sort of go over that exposure triangle again and then i'll show you another couple of examples so if we just think of the things that can control exposure and they are we've got iso at the top here we've got shutter speed and we've got aperture and basically in in a photo the two things that you're trying to do are get the right shutter speed so if you want to shoot a fast wave and you want to fast shutter speed or if you want to shoot a wave and get some motion in it you might want to show a slower shutter speed so you're going to control shutter speed and then aperture is going to control your depth of field so you really want to control these two things when you've set these or what you want then to get the right exposure quite often you're using iso now it it you're either using iso or you or you're using one of the other two but by using a combination of these three so you want a histogram that sort of looks a bit like you know this so it's um you push to the right a little bit that that's that's really important um i always go on about push the right the reason that you want the histogram push to the right is you want to get the most amount of light onto the sensor without over exposing the photo the more light you get the less noise you have so it's really important that and by controlling iso aperture and shutter speed then you're able to do that so i just wanted to briefly do that i'm going to go over this in a lot more detail in a future video um but also in my master classes as well i talk about this a little bit and i talk about lots more examples like i've just shown here in a huge amount more detail okay so on to a couple of photos i just want to show you two photos that i took when i was in iceland and the first one is this one here so this was as you can see if i just um just get it here this was a 200 millimeter shot and i shot it at 1 2 000 of a second f 4.5 and iso 1000 so you might might think well why did you only shoot at f 4.5 or why two thousandth of a second so in this particular shot what i wanted to do is i wanted to capture the wave i wanted to get all these little globules in the wave to do that because they're moving fast and needed a fast shutter speed i wasn't hugely bothered about depth of field because you know if you look at this the birds in the background are actually out of focus but the waves in focus so i tracked the wave coming forward i shot at two thousandth of a second and then it was basically to get the right exposure set the iso um what i needed to be and in this case it was iso a thousand so what i was trying to do is get the right exposure by combining iso aperture shutter speed so the next one i want to show is this one so this was a shot where there was this water coming in i was trying to shoot these waves and it was it was pretty manic really because there's lots of things going on so i knew i wanted about a one second exposure because it experimented and that i think worked best for the water and the waves breaking it gave the feeling that i wanted so in this case um i shot 1.3 seconds um so that was set in stone but i wanted um quite a lot of depth of field in it because i wanted you know the beginning of this ice berg here all the way back to the waves in the background in focus and i was shooting at 22 millimeters so i needed f 13. now it just happened i don't think i had a filter on here it just happened that that was iso 64. but if i couldn't get a 1.3 second f13 if that did if that overexposed it even iso 64 then i would have had to put an nd filter on to reduce the exposure so i could get the right um the right exposure it fitted within the histogram correctly so basically you're just trying to control those three things sometimes like this one here you might have to add a filter um but that's that's what it is really sometimes it's really easy because there's no wind you're shooting in the wood the shutter speed just doesn't matter at all so you don't worry about that too much that's another variable you can change you've got that and the iso to change to your heart's content and then it's only the aperture that's stuck in stone it is really easy you've just got to go out and practice and mess about with things so i hope you've enjoyed that i just want to thank squarespace for sponsoring this video it really makes a big difference to me obviously i do these videos for free and if somebody can come in and sponsor it then that's amazing um so squarespace are a fantastic platform i use it all the time for my own online store and if you're looking to set up a blog or maybe a portfolio of your photos or maybe you just want to set up an online store and start a mini business then squarespace make it super easy so if you're looking to get a website with squarespace then make sure you use the offer code nigel or you can go to squarespace.com forward slash nigel thanks ever so much for watching and until next sunday bye [Music] you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 37,644

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, camera settings, settings for landscape photography, focus, iso, shutter speed, aperture, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: xW907dkOwZI

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021