No matter what Alpha camera you might have, you can easily get perfectly lit pictures shooting on AUTO mode. Sometimes this may not be the case especially with tricky lighting. Here’s a brief introduction on how exposure works in photography.

The exposure triangle

Three things go into how well-lit a picture is: shutter, aperture and ISO. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these before - they’re a breeze to understand.

Imagine a room with one window. Shutter is literally the shutters to the window that can be opened and closed to let light in. If you leave them open, the room is flooded with light.

Aperture simply means how big the window is. If it’s huge, and you open the window, a lot of light will come in. If it’s a small window, less light will come in.

Finally, ISO is the room, and how sensitive it is to light. A white-coloured room (high ISO) will light up far more than a dark one (low ISO). You would be able to get more overall brightness in the white room, but see more detail in the dark room - like the small scratch marks and bits of fluff that would have been invisible otherwise.

The shutters are opened and closed. The amount of light that has entered the room is your exposure. Now, if it was a bright day outside, it would only take a quick opening of the shutter to get an idea of what the room looked like. On a gloomy day, you’d have to leave the shutter open longer to get a picture of the room. And that is it - what you saw in the room is the picture you took!

How it translates

With a camera, technology does that for you. It reads how much light is coming in and decides how big the aperture should be. It also decides how long to open the shutter, to let in just the right amount of light to light the room. Except in this case, the room retains what was outside the window. All with the press of a button!

You might have found this automation to fail in some cases - most commonly, photographing people in strong sun and nightscapes. The camera reads the scene, and if the person is in the shade, it thinks it’s still a great picture because everything else is lit nicely. So the people appear really dark. And for nightscapes, the camera thinks it’s done a good job after capturing the shapes in detail - it doesn’t get that you want the lights to really pop.

Once you get to being able to control shutter, aperture and ISO, take the same picture with different settings and you’ll see how each element affects your picture. Just remember - it’s about how long the shutters stay open, how big a window you choose, and how sensitive the room is to detail.

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