Digital Camera Lessons – Icons For Exposures

In my last article I talked a little about the letters used in the shooting modes of automatic cameras. Shooting modes are how the camera sets the aperture and shutter speed by the photographers preferences for a properly exposed photograph.

It is possible to have many different exposures that will all properly expose a photograph.

For example, if you set your lens to let in a lot of light and use a fast shutter speed, it could be the same exposure as setting your lens to let in a little bit of light and use a slower shutter speed. Both will result in a properly exposed photograph and the camera takes care of it for you. So why should I care how I set my camera if it is designed to give me a good exposure no matter how I set it? Lenses have single focus points but a range of depth that also appears in focus because of the rules of optics. The range of what appears in focus increases with a smaller aperture and decreases with a wider aperture. This is what is called depth of field. Aperture, the iris of the lens, is what controls depth of field. In my last article I talked about what the letters P, S, A, and M were on the dial on top of your camera. Unless you have read your camera manual and know a little about photography they may never mean anything to you. The camera manufactures know this so they also put some universally known icons up there on the dial too. Some cameras may only have the letters (like mine) and others may just have icons and still others might have both. Although the number of icons may vary in number with the camera models I will go through the basic ones.

Each icon will set a programmed aperture and shutter speed to achieve the desired type of picture.

If you are going to take a portrait of someone set the icon on your camera to that of a head or face.

With a portrait it is desirable to have just the person in the picture in focus and not any distracting foreground or background. For that reason your camera will automatically set the aperture to a fairly open setting, causing the depth of field to be quite shallow (not much in focus), rendering the foreground and background out of focus.

On your dial is also an icon of someone running.

Set your camera to this icon when you want to stop action like in sports events or action of any kind. What you are telling your camera is that you need a fast shutter speed to stop action so it will do it for you. This is the same as setting your camera on S but you choose a fast shutter speed yourself.

Another icon is that of a landscape with some mountains in it.

Setting your camera to this icon tells it that you are shooting something with a lot of depth. You need a fairly small aperture (for good depth of field) and a fairly fast shutter speed so you don’t blur the whole thing because of your excitement of such a great shot. On the landscape icon it’s all automatically done for you.

The icon of a flower lets your camera know that you are going to take pictures of something small.

The main thing this does is adjusts your lens to focus closer than normal. It might also give you a slightly larger aperture because depth of field is very shallow the closer you get to an object. With a larger aperture you can get a faster shutter speed and therefore lessen the chance of shaking the camera during the exposure. The last icon is that of a scene with stars or perhaps a moon. That will tell your camera that there is not much light so the camera will open the aperture all the way and give you a shutter speed that is just fast enough to stop any camera shake. If there is not enough light the camera might flash all kinds of lights at you, warning of impending exposure doom. At this point it will probably trigger the flash during your exposure and give everyone red eye. If this becomes the situation be sure to switch on the red eye reduction feature on your flash.