Photography tips and tricks

Camera settings you should know already

Every craft has it’s tools and every craftsman should know how to use the tools effectively.

Tim Wells
9 min readJun 4, 2024

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We’ve all heard about the exposure triangle, the three camera settings that control the exposure of a photograph being taken using a camera. Modern cameras will show you the effects of changing the settings, right there on the screen (to some extent) but do you really know what they do and when to change which one?

Photo by Tim Schmidbauer on Unsplash

Aperture.

The aperture is a bladed diaphragm in lens of the camera which can be opened wide or closed tight. It’s a whole of varying size in the lens that has the primary function of controlling the depth of focus. Because of how it works, it will also have an impact on how much light gets through to the camera sensor.
A wide open aperture (low f number) will produce a shallow depth of focus (also known as depth of field), meaning only a small amount of the image at the focal point will be in focus and anything behind or in front will become blurred depending on distance.
A tight or closed aperture (high f number) will produce a deep depth of focus, meaning that most if not all of the image can be in focus from up close to the horizon.

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