Core Settings

I was at a workshop at the Leica Gallery Los Angeles waiting for the late afternoon session to begin. As I waited I was tempted to sit down and browse through the many photography books on display. The range of photographers and styles was incredible and the collection offered a diversity I did not often see in a local bookstore. Yet I looked through the window and was seduced by the quality of the late afternoon light. The books would be here; the light would not. I grabbed the Leica M10 that had been loaned to me and walked outside.

The sun was moving toward the horizon. Its glow cast a warm yellow-orange color on the buildings and passing cars. Street signs and traffic signals cast elongated shadows that created unexpected patterns on the sidewalk. The texture of the street was revealed and included the truncated yellow domes that are a fixture of each sidewalk corner. The sunlight made the domes appear more saturated, drawing attention not only to them, but also to the curb’s strip of peeling red paint.

The light was fading fast and I knew that I would not likely find a better stage for a moment to play itself out. There was not much foot traffic, which worried me, but experience had taught me that patience frequently pays off. As a few people walked through the scene, I made several exposures. They were tests that allowed me to experiment with exposure and composition. These were not captured at the right moment, but they provided me a sense of where I wanted to be when the right subject finally arrived.

When a man with two dogs crossed the street, I made several frames. The dogs possessed a fluffy white fur that glowed with sunlight. I stopped and asked the man about his dogs. We chatted for a moment and then he continued on.

After the man left, I did not stop making photographs. As much as I thought I might like one of the images I had just produced, I held out hope for something better. The light was still there and so was the potential for something else to happen.

I made more frames as other people walked through the scene, but nothing thrilled me. Then I noticed that the man and his dogs had returned and were waiting to cross the street to my left. It was then that a cyclist appeared and rode toward us. I could tell he was going to ride up onto the curb. From the previous photographs, I had become aware of the shadows cast by anyone who stepped onto the curb. I knew that the wheels of the bicycle would provide a great graphic element, especially when juxtaposed against the figures of the two dogs. I took a few steps back to ensure I included the dogs and the long stretch of shadow from the cyclist. I made just two frames and then the moment was gone.

I remained there until the light disappeared behind the buildings in the distance. It was only then that I played back the images on the camera’s LCD screen and was rewarded for my patience. Now I could return to the books.

Our photographs are captured within fractions of a second. When we discuss our cameras, we talk about fast autofocus and fast lenses. This fixation can make it seem like great photography is dependent on speed and speed alone. Hence, a great photographer must have fast reflexes. This is only partly true.

Depressing the shutter release button is more than just a matter of good timing. It is the culmination of a series of choices. It is the choice to stop rather than continue walking. It is the decision to go horizontal rather than vertical. It is the decision to include certain elements in the foreground and background. It is the choice to go with a shallow depth of field rather than a deep one.

There are many times when all of these choices are made in a split second—a kind of practiced reflex. However, I contend that the majority of photographs can be made much more thoughtfully, even before all the elements of a scene have revealed themselves. For me, it begins well before I have even discovered my first subject of the day and have exposed a single frame.

Core Settings

The photograph that begins this chapter is a perfect example of a time when being prepared was key to getting the shot. When I decided to stop at the corner, I had no idea that a pair of dogs and a cyclist would converge at a precise moment in time. All I had was an instinct that the quality of light and shadow, of line and shape, might offer me a setting where something interesting could occur. But to prepare myself for that opportunity, I made sure that my camera was ready to capture the moment when it was finally revealed to me.

The photograph was the culmination of a series of choices. And while there were several choices that were made at the moment of exposure, the majority of them were made before “the moment.” Because such magical moments are so fleeting, so unpredictable, it is important to make as many choices as possible before the moment of exposure. Otherwise, making decisions becomes a distraction and robs you of the opportunity for a successful photograph. How many times have you missed a wonderful photograph because you were preoccupied with your camera settings? With this in mind, my essential choices begin with the camera’s core settings.

My core settings include ISO, aperture, shutter speed, white balance, and focus. Each is established at the beginning of my shooting session. This prepares me to make images and provides a valuable and repeatable starting point for making any necessary changes.

ISO

The first setting I adjust is the ISO, which controls the sensitivity of the camera’s sensor to light. ISO ranges will vary from camera to camera, starting as low as 50 and going up to an astronomically high 3,280,000. The higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor is to light—an important consideration when working with diminishing levels of illumination.

On a bright sunny day, I use an ISO of 100 or 200. On a day that is cloudy or heavily overcast, I set my ISO to 400 or 800. When photographing indoors under any variety of artificial light sources, I increase the ISO to 1600, 3200, or even higher. By increasing the ISO, I ensure that the camera delivers an accurate exposure. This also provides me more flexibility with respect to my choice of aperture and shutter speed.

When photographing for a local nonprofit organization that gives young girls opportunities to work with and care for horses, I was faced with difficult lighting conditions. Inside the barn, light levels were low and I needed to increase my camera’s ISO to 3200 in order to achieve a reasonable shutter speed. Though the shutter speed was a stop slower than I normally felt comfortable shooting at, I was confident that I could still produce a sharp result without increasing the ISO further.

As you increase the ISO, it may introduce more noise to the image, but most modern cameras maintain excellent dynamic range and color accuracy with ISOs as high as 6400. I do not hesitate to increase the ISO as needed. I can often reduce the presence of noise in my final image in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Digital cameras also possess an automatic ISO feature that dynamically controls the ISO based on light levels. I find this to be a valuable tool when I am faced with fast-changing lighting conditions or when setting the ISO manually proves to be time-consuming. However, I set the ISO manually whenever possible so that I produce consistent results and develop an awareness of the quantity and quality of the light.

Exposure Mode

For most shooting situations, I set my camera to aperture-priority mode. In this exposure mode, I set the camera’s aperture, leaving the camera to choose the shutter speed based on the quantity of light. Having control over the aperture provides me important creative control to produce a deep or shallow depth of field.

My default aperture of choice is f/5.6, but this is not solely for aesthetic reasons. When I set my ISO correctly, this is an aperture that results in a shutter speed of around 1/200 second, which allows me to shoot handheld. I want to reduce any chance that my handling of the camera produces a soft image due to camera shake. Even though I might produce a sharp result with a shutter speed as low as 1/30 second, this normally requires me to be very conscious of how I handle the camera. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I am always so calm and steady. I would much rather use a shutter speed that counters my jittery eagerness to make the photograph.

If I am shooting on an overcast day and set my ISO to 400 (see chart A), I expect that the camera will select a shutter speed of 1/4000 second at an aperture of f/5.6. If I close down the aperture to f/16 to increase my depth of field, the shutter speed will likely be 1/500 second, well above my minimum requirement. This provides me with great flexibility.

chart A

chart B

If light levels decrease even more, I increase my ISO to 800 (see chart B), and with an aperture of f/5.6, the camera will choose a shutter speed of 1/500 second. If I set my aperture to f/8, the camera will change to 1/250 second. If I want a wide aperture of f/2.8, the shutter speed increases to around 1/2000 second. In any of these cases, I do not worry about producing a soft image because of camera shake.

By setting my aperture to f/5.6, I establish a consistent starting point. If I want to quickly change my aperture in any direction, I already know what aperture I am moving from. I can even adjust the aperture control simply by paying attention to the number of clicks in either direction. Most importantly, if I encounter a scene to which I have to react instantly, I can bring the camera to my eye and make a photograph with the reasonable expectation that the image will be both well-exposed and sharp.

If I do change the aperture for any reason, after I am done making my photograph, I return the aperture to f/5.6 in preparation for the next photo opportunity. As I said before, doing this ahead of time means there is one less choice to make at the time of exposure that could potentially distract me from making the photograph.

In aperture-priority mode, the camera’s metering system will provide an “accurate exposure” for the scene, which retains detail in both the shadows and the highlights. This is what I want the majority of the time. However, there are times when the lighting can fool the camera, resulting in an exposure in which you lose detail in either the highlights or shadows. In a high-contrast scene, the exposure may be biased toward the shadows or highlights, and the camera’s meter, while trying its best, may deliver an exposure that loses important details. Under such circumstances, I use manual exposure mode to lock in my exposure or to purposely bias the exposure toward the highlights.

When I was preparing to make this photograph in which a man is walking past a security gate, I knew that the camera’s meter would choose an exposure that would open up the shadows dominating the scene. I knew from experience that this would result in an overexposure in the highlight area, which is where I wanted to position a subject. So I set my camera to manual exposure mode and chose an aperture and shutter speed combination that biased the exposure toward the highlights and allowed the shadows to be rendered darker. I knew I would lose some details in the shadow areas, but I was okay with that because those elements were not as important to me. I also knew that I could recover some shadow detail during post-processing if I needed to. When the man in the red hoodie walked through the scene, I had complete confidence that he would be well-exposed.

In this situation, I also had the option to remain in aperture-priority mode and use the camera’s exposure compensation mode. (Exposure compensation allows you to bias the exposure of the camera in increments of 1/3 stop, up to plus or minus three to five stops, depending on your camera.) However, I wanted to make sure that all the photographs in the sequence were consistently exposed. Otherwise, subjects wearing light or dark clothing could have influenced the exposure in unpredictable ways.

White Balance

White balance controls how the camera renders color. Because different light sources (e.g., sunlight, tungsten, fluorescent, LED, halogen) produce light at different color temperatures, it is important that the camera is prepared to produce images illuminated by those light sources.

By default, a digital camera is set for automatic white balance. In this mode, the camera evaluates the light coming through the lens and, to the best of its ability, discerns what kind of lighting you are shooting under. This often produces reasonable results and is a good choice if the scene is illuminated by one or more different light sources.

I prefer to set the white balance manually. I find that the presets provide greater color accuracy than the automatic white balance. Using presets also ensures that all the shots made during a particular session are consistent in terms of color. Using auto white balance, which adjusts white balance and color dynamically, can result in photographs that are not consistent from one shot to the next, which can make editing large numbers of images difficult.

When I shot the photograph of the taqueria, I was keenly aware of the unpredictability of my camera’s auto white balance feature under fluorescent lights. Not only are there warm and cool fluorescent lights, but even within these categories, the color temperature can vary greatly. I set the color temperature manually to achieve the most accurate color possible. Though I did not completely nail the white balance, it was close enough that I only needed to make a slight adjustment for it in Lightroom.

If you shoot raw images rather than jpegs, you can adjust your white balance after the fact in your raw converter. However, I prefer to get it right in-camera and eliminate an additional step in my post-processing workflow.

Focus

One of the greatest advances in camera technology is autofocus. It not only helps to produce in-focus photographs, but it does so in conditions under which it would be difficult to focus manually. These systems are fast and accurate and work wonderfully even under difficult lighting conditions.

But just because the word “auto” proceeds the word “focus” does not mean that it is a control you can ignore; quite the contrary. Your camera likely has multiple autofocus sensors, ranging from dozens to hundreds, each of which is used by the camera to detect focus on your subject. The area of coverage will vary from camera to camera, but you can choose whether to use all or some of those sensors for focus detection.

By default, the camera will use all of the sensors to determine focus on your subject, whether the subject stands in the middle of the frame or is slightly off-center. You depress the shutter release button halfway, and the camera quickly detects focus. Then the photograph can be made. It works beautifully most of the time.

However, there are times when the autofocus is fooled, particularly when there are multiple elements within the scene, such as an object in front of your subject. In such a situation the camera targets something other than your subject. You might encounter this, for example, when shooting a sporting event with multiple athletes on the field.

Rather than allowing the camera to choose the point of focus using all the autofocus sensors, I will select a focus setting where only a small group of sensors or even a single sensor is used for focus detection. I will also choose a focus mode that allows me to move the target area around to prioritize my subject wherever they are located in the frame. This eliminates the possibility that a secondary element will be in focus. This is especially important when shooting with a wide aperture, such as f/2, which produces a very shallow depth of field, or when producing a portrait in which I want to nail focus on the eyes.

I set my AF sensors to the center area by default. This prepares me for the majority of images in which my subject is likely to be at or close to the center of the frame. However, if they are not, I can quickly move the AF target area to anywhere in the screen.

For this photograph of NPR host Jesse Thorn in his studio, I knew that the camera might experience difficulty nailing focus on him. The light levels were low and there were different elements in the booth and in the reflection that could confuse the camera’s autofocus system, resulting in a soft image. So I chose a single AF point for focus detection and targeted Jesse’s eye to ensure that he was rendered sharp in the composition.

Raw versus Jpeg

The photographs that you create can be saved in at least two different file formats: raw and jpeg. With jpegs, the captured image gains the benefit of the camera’s onboard processing with adjustments to contrast, sharpness, and color. This usually produces an image that does not require much post-processing and that you could immediately print or share on your social networks. Jpeg files can be opened by virtually any device or software. The files are compressed, allowing you to save more images to a memory card than you can with raw files, which are uncompressed.

Raw files do not have the benefit of any in-camera processing. A raw file contains the unprocessed data that was captured by the sensor and is saved to the memory card using the camera manufacturer’s own codec. These files require post-processing using a raw converter like the one available in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Unlike jpegs, these files cannot be immediately shared and must be processed and converted into another file format for e-mailing or printing.

The great advantage of raw files is that they contain the full dynamic range captured by the sensor. This gives you full control over the tonality, color, contrast, and sharpness of the image. With raw files, you have the freedom to interpret the images in any way you choose, whereas jpegs are processed for you, leaving less latitude for further refinement.

Most professional photographers prefer to shoot raw files because of the control that it gives them. On the other hand, jpegs can save you time and effort because you don’t have to process each image.

If you are new to photography, you may prefer to set your camera to raw + jpeg, which will save both the raw and jpeg files to your memory card. This gives you jpeg files that you can immediately print and share, and you can later work with the raw files as you gain experience working in your photo-editing software of choice. Just make sure that you use a large-capacity card to accommodate the increased number of files.

A Consistent Starting Point

By always setting my ISO, exposure mode, aperture, white balance, and focus to the same default settings, I establish a starting point for all my photography. I avoid the experience of my first images of the day being ruined because they were made with settings from a shoot that occurred days or weeks before. I always start from exactly the same place.

When a scene demands a change, I do not have to adjust each and every setting. At most, I normally adjust one or two. If the light changes, I increase or decrease my ISO and adjust my white balance accordingly. Because I have my aperture set to f/5.6, I quickly check my shutter speed to ensure that I am shooting at 1/200 second or faster. If not, I increase my ISO further. After that, I focus entirely on composition.

As I was talking to a man on the street, I noticed the cigarette in his hand. I quickly adjusted my aperture to f/2.5 because I knew that I wanted to render the tip of his cigarette with a very shallow depth of field. I did not have to worry about shutter speed, as I knew that it would be significantly higher than my base minimum of 1/200 second. All I needed to do was focus on the tip of the cigarette, compose the shot, and make the photograph.

I can make whatever changes I need to even before I have discovered my first subject if I make it a point to evaluate the conditions under which I will be shooting, whether it is a bright sunny day at a music festival or dim evening inside a restaurant. By making any necessary adjustments before the moment is revealed to me, I minimize technical distractions that stand in the way of my making a photograph.