When you are interested in photography you will start reading books on the subject or browsing the web. Eventually you will encounter the rule of thirds. Or maybe, when playing around with your camera settings, you found this grid you can overlay on your screen or viewfinder. You may have wondered about the use of it. Both have to do with picture composition and creating appealing pictures.
Photography is all about light. To get the exposure of our picture right, we need to balance the aperture size and shutter speed. This can become tricky in low light situations. If both aperture and shutter speed don’t suffice to get the exposure right, we can increase the ISO value. The ISO value is a measure for the sensitivity of the sensor. ISO stands for International Standards Organization.
Through selecting the range of focus in your picture, you can draw attention to the elements you want to emphasize. You can accomplish this by selecting the focal point and by choosing the appropriate aperture size. Understanding Depth Of Field (DOF) is a powerful creative tool. We will explain how decreasing the aperture size may compensate – to a certain degree – being out of focus. Therefore we will go through some (very) basic physics, starting with the concept of focal distance.