Photography: It’s all about Light

When thinking about photography, it all really comes down to light. That’s what goes onto the cameras sensor, and that is what makes an image. Exposing the perfect picture comes down to your ability to control the light that comes into the camera. There are three settings on your camera that really control the light coming in.

1. 1. Aperture: The size of the “hole” light comes through to your sensor
2. 2. Shutter Speed: The amount of time light is being captured by the sensor
3. 3. ISO: The sensitivity of your sensor.

I’ll cover each of these in separate blog posts. But being able to control these three settings are what will enable you to capture that perfect shot. These all three come together to become the “exposure” of the picture. You’ve probably heard the term “overexposed” or “underexposed” before. By changing aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, you can control the amount of light in the picture and get the perfect exposure.

Below are three examples of exposure:

Underexposure

Overexposure

Correct Exposure

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A great way to organize images.

Full Disclosure: I work for Adobe, so I may be biased… however, I don’t recommend anything I don’t use myself.

I’ve been using Photoshop Lightroom for over a year now, and I still love it. Prior to finding Lightroom, I’d been taking digital pictures for about 8 years, and had never come up with a system that I liked for storing and cataloging images. I’d tried using Windows Explorer file system, iPhoto, and up until last year, I was pretty happy with Picasa, but Lightroom has blown them all away.

There are several functions in Lightroom beyond just organizing (all of which I love), but for just remembering what/where/when you took a picture, the Library module in Lightroom is awesome. Right from importing your photos from you camera, it keeps everything in one place. For safety, it automatically makes copies of your pictures for auto-backup. (having lost a lot of data, I can’t stress this enough).

I’m gonna spend a lot of time talking about Lightroom in this blog as I learn more. It is super powerful and has tons of features that’ll probably take me months to learn, however if you use it as nothing more than just an organizer, you’ll still be happy.

A couple things to point out: Lightroom 2 is available for a free 30-day trial from Adobe.

Also, to get started using the software, I highly recommend the Lynda.com training It’s done by Chris Orwig and really helped get me going with the software.