Repetition The Key to Perfection

We don’t have to take pictures outside to get familiar with our camera! The beauty of the digital camera is that we can immediately delete what we don’t need. An exercise to get familiar with the different setting on a camera is to take an object in our environment or house and take photographs of it using  different settings and then compare it, over and over and over. How will this work?

To understand exposure

Forget about the interaction between aperture, shutter speed and ISO for now. Take a day, and say today we choose to play with the ISO setting. We will make the ISO setting priority on our camera (if there is that option), meaning we take the camera off auto. We will pick an object in our environment, a picture, a mug, anything, start with your lowest ISO setting (e.g. 100) take a picture of the object, then set your camera to the highest possible ISO setting (e.g 1600) take another picture of the object. compare the two pictures; next take a picture of your object with the next higher ISO setting from the previous (200 in this case), then take another picture with the next lower from the highest you used previously (in this case 800). Make sure you label all the pictures so you can compare them on the computer. Some cameras (especially compacts) don’t have an ISO setting you can change, they will normally have an Exposure Value (EV) setting, usually from -2 to +2, each value in this case is equivalent to one ISO adjustment.
The whole idea is for you to see and understand the effect of that particular setting (ISO in this case) on a photograph, while keeping other settings like aperture, shutter speed, subject and ambient light constant. The next day you do the same exercise for aperture, and the day after that you do the same for shutter speed, then the day after that you combine ISO and aperture (highest aperture/lowest ISO, lowest aperture/highest ISO), and so on
This “getting familiar with the camera” exercise is applicable to a compact or DSLR camera and can be used with all the different settings of any camera, I know it is repetitous and time consuming but as they say “Repitition Is The Mother Of All Skills”, further down the line when you start getting those wow photographs you will have the satisfaction of your hard work. if something appears hard, we need to take a break, then come back and play with it some more, while remembering to be easy on ourselves, it is meant to be fun.