This piece is written for DSLR owners. It assumes your camera gives you control over individual exposure and color settings. Some advanced compact point & shoot cameras also offer these kind of controls. Other simpler/cheaper cameras offer some or none of them. As the last section of this article suggests, read your manual.

Know Your Exposure

Your camera is a lightproof box containing a photographic medium. These days the medium is typically an electronic sensor or if you’re hip, film. You make images by opening up the box and allowing light to hit the medium… this is exposure. You control the exposure by adjusting three variables:

1. Shutter Speed – The length of time the camera’s window is open and allowing light to enter.
2. Aperture – The size of the hole through which light passes into the camera. Also known as the “f number”.
3. ISO – The sensitivity of the medium to light. Also known as film speed.

In manual mode you are responsible for choosing all three of these settings. Your combination of choices determines how much light is permitted to enter the camera. If you make a poor choice of settings, your photo will either be too bright (overexposed) or too dark (underexposed).

How you arrive at your exposure settings depends entirely upon what type of image you want to make. Since this is a “crash course” and not a lesson on exposure, I will not make a weak attempt at explaining it in just a few sentences. Instead I recommend you read a great book called Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera by Bryan Peterson. It was an invaluable and eye-opening read when I bought my first DSLR.

In semi-automatic modes you choose some settings and leave others for the camera to decide. For example, in Aperture Priority mode you might choose f/5.6. When you hit the shutter button, the camera would meter the scene and choose a shutter speed which compliments your choice of f/5.6 in such a way that the image turns out properly exposed. Newer cameras with Auto ISO can choose that setting automatically as well. With older cameras, you have to choose the ISO manually.

In automatic mode the camera makes all the decisions while you just point and shoot.

In automatic and semi-automatic modes where the camera is choosing settings for you, the image doesn’t always turn out perfect. Many times the camera will make a mistake and under or overexpose. You can control this by adjusting Exposure Compensation.

If it looks like your photos are a little dark, you might compensate by +1 which tells the camera “overexpose by one stop”. Since the camera was underexposing, and now you told it to overexpose, it will choose settings that result in brighter images. Conversely if you’re getting too bright results you might choose a negative compensation setting which means “hey camera, please underexpose”.

Exposure Compensation is typically represented as a range of values. Here’s a screenshot of the EV scale from the LCD of a digital rebel, going from -2 to +2 in 1/3 increments. The little notch in the middle under 0 means the EV is set to zero (no compensation).

Know Your Light

Ambient light is whatever is present in your environment. Turn off the flash and you’re practicing “available light” photography.

When the ambient light doesn’t fit your vision, doesn’t give the look you want, is of poor quality or is just too dark you make your own light. This ranges from simple flash photography to complex lighting setups (ex. multiple flashes, studio lights, continuous lighting).

You may also combine the two, balancing available light with flash photography. For example, shoot someone standing in front of a sunset and they’ll probably come out as a silhouette. But turn on the flash and you can light the person up while still getting the colorful sunset background. To accomplish this you choose the camera’s exposure settings based on the available light, then set the flash to expose for the subject.

The temperature of available light greatly effects the colors in your photo. Some light is “warm” while other light is “cool”. This is the reason indoor photos without flash often turn out yellow. The white balance setting gives you control over the color temperature in your photos.

Most cameras are set to automatic white balance by default. This mode usually works fine for outdoor daylight shooting. You start seeing weird colors indoors:

• Fluorescent lights give your photos a green color cast.
• Incandescent bulbs give off a yellow “tungsten” light.

Most cameras have white balance presets for these situations plus cloudy, daylight and flash, as well as a fine-tuning adjustment that lets you directly choose the color temperature as degrees Kelvin. Choose lower numbers to balance warmer lights (e.g. 2850-3200K for indoor incandescent light) and higher numbers for cooler light (e.g. 5000K for midday sunlight).

When shooting JPEG try experimenting with these presets. When shooting RAW you have the advantage of adjusting color temperature with software such as Photoshop, so many photographers leave this setting on auto and worry about white balance after the fact.

Know Your Camera

Every camera’s features and controls are slightly different, so there’s really not much to say here besides making a general point: know how your camera works inside-out. Read the manual cover to cover and commit all its capabilities to memory. Shoot every chance you get so the controls go to muscle memory.

Not being familiar with all your cameras controls and features is a handicap. Instead of thinking about important things like light and where to stand, you waste time trying to figure out which button changes a setting.