Cameras are complicated.
I remember when I bought my first DSLR: I was frustrated that I couldn’t just capture what I saw through my viewfinder. It took a ton of trial and error but I kept at it and, when I finally managed to work everything out, I started being able to capture some pretty spectacular images.

• In this post I will share with you everything that I’ve learned so that you can learn from my mistakes, instead of your own.
• If you’re interested in learning how to understand your camera in just 10 minutes, click here to sign up for my free video training.
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As photographers, we tend to be visual learners. And it’s my job to make learning photography as easy as possible for you.

So I thought to myself, “What better way to help photographers learn how to use their cameras, than by creating an infographic?” And that’s exactly what I did.

Learning how exposure works will help you to take control of your camera and take better photos.

Aperture, shutter speed, ISO are the elements that combine to create an exposure.

As you’ll soon learn, these elements have an effect on more than just the exposure, causing alterations in depth of field, motion blur, and digital noise. Once you understand how each one works, you can start diving into manual mode and really take that control back from your camera.

Exposure happens in three steps, starting with the aperture. This is the hole inside the lens, through which the light passes. It’s similar to the pupil of your eye: the wider the aperture, the more light is allowed in and vice versa.

Simple? Not quite.

• As the aperture widens, the f/number gets lower and more light is allowed into the camera. This is great for low light but be aware that it’s going to make the depth of field very shallow – not ideal when taking landscapes.
• So there’s a bit of give and take and I go into full detail about that in this post.
• Exposure will be much easier if you can memorise the f/stop scale.

      The scale is as follows: f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22.
          
        

Once the light has passed through the aperture of the lens, it reaches the shutter Now you need to decide how much of that light you’re going to allow into the camera.

 
        Ordinarily, you only want a very small fraction of a second (for example 1/250) 
        to prevent motion blur. However, different shutter speeds complement different 
        situations: anything from really fast (1/4000) for sports photography to really 
        slow (30 seconds) for night photography.
          

It all depends on what you’re shooting and how much light you have available to you.

Once the light has passed through the aperture and been filtered by the shutter speed, it reaches the sensor, where we decide upon the ISO.

        As you turn the ISO number up, you increase the exposure but, at the same time, 
        the image quality decreases; there will be more digital noise or “grain”.
        

So you have to decide upon your priorities in terms of exposure vs grain. For example, I would reduce the image quality if it meant that I could prevent motion blur in my photo as there’s no possible way to fix that in post (yet, at least).

Once you’ve understood aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you need to learn how each of these elements of exposure work together.

        In this post you will learn about the ‘stop’ based system for measuring exposure 
        but, more importantly, how to prioritise the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO for 
        the best photo, every time.