Elemental Controls

A Beginner's Guide to Wildlife and Nature Photography

Elemental Controls

    This section will discuss the basic functions and controls which you’ll need to use to compose great photographs. Most cameras produced today function on an automatic mode; the camera uses a sensor to measure the amount of light, then adjusts aperture and shutter speed to produce an image which resembles what you see. It does this by calculating what settings will be necessary to make the photo average 18% grey (remember that the camera's sensor is colorblind). This usually works out very well for taking snapshots at a party or family event, but can easily fail in the environments which you’ll be working. So, it is necessary that you yourself know how to adjust the camera to get great photos (recall that this is the predominant reason for which we need a camera which can be manually adjusted).
    A camera works by light flowing through a hole onto the film or sensor chip much like a stream. The more light that reaches the film or sensor, the brighter the image will be (no light means a black photo, too much light means a white one, with everything in between possible). If this hole (located in the lens) is made larger, more light will flow through. Likewise if the amount of time which the light is allowed to pass through the hole increases, the brighter the image will be. These two settings are respectively called aperture and shutter speed.
    The aperture setting (f-) (size of the hole in the lens) is measured by an f-number which is the ratio of focal length to the aperture’s diameter. Any given lens can be set to certain f-numbers which are called the f-stops (generally ranging from 1.4 to 32 with most lenses operating in a much smaller window). The f-number is inversely proportional to the size of the aperture, so: the bigger the number, the smaller the opening, the less light that is allowed to the film or chip, the darker the image is. The opposite is, of course, also true. Another important aspect of the photograph, depth-of-field, is controlled by the aperture. This is the range of an image which will be in focus (how much in front of, and behind the subject will also be in focus). The smaller the f-number, the smaller the depth-of-field. If you have a subject which you’d like to stand out, say a small bird, you should adjust the aperture to a low number, so that everything around the bird will appear blurry. If you want to include the enviornment as well, or perhaps the entirety of a larger animal (crocodile), the selected f-stop should be larger to allow more of the image to remain in focus. “Doesn’t this change how bright the image is too, though?” Yes. That is why you have another control over the brightness of the image, shutter-speed, which is explored next (an identical exposure can be produced by changing shutter speed with respect to aperture).

The same lens at f-22, f-1.7, and f-2.8 in respective order. If you'd like a higher quality image of any pictures on this site, send me an e-mail.

Shutter-speed (s) is the amount of time which the film or chip is exposed to light (traditionally the length of time that the shutter is displaced) and is measured in seconds. Shutter-speed typically ranges from 1/5000 of a second to 30 seconds with an additional setting, Bulb, for keeping the shutter released for how long the shutter release is held, or time between two presses. Most cameras operate in a much smaller range (1/1000 of a second to 16 seconds). Like aperture, shutter speed dictates more about a picture than simply how bright it is. The camera will collect whatever light enters during the time that the shutter is released, so if the shutter Shutter Speed Setting on a Camera

speed is long, and the camera is moved, there will be a streaking or blurred effect. If both the camera and subject are perfectly still, it is possible to have a perfectly sharp photograph with very long shutter speeds (¼ of a second or more). However, it is much more often the case that either the camera or subject will be moving (even a breeze or vibrations to a camera on a tripod count as moving). Since this is so, especially for wildlife photography, the shortest shutter speed possible(while still allowing enough light for a balanced photo) is typically desired. There are many creative things which can be done with long shutter speeds (including ones that last an entire night), but for most photographs which try to capture an
animal as clearly as possible, they should be avoided.

My Ricoh KR-10 Super's Shutter Speed/On switch. It is set to 1/250 s. B is for Bulb

White Balance (or color balance) is the overall tone which an image will have (see image). Digital cameras can usually compute successfully the proper white balance, but there will be times when you need to adjust it yourself. There are typically several presets of white balance built into cameras for different types of light (sunny, cloudy, indoors, flash, etc.) and sometimes the ability to create your own. Select a white balance which depicts the image as you’d like it - it’s as simple as that! If you don’t know how to select white balance on your camera, just consult the owner’s manual- it’s different for each camera. With a film camera however, the tint of the colors needs to be adjusted by filters. Look through the viewfinder at the image and decide whether it should be cooler, warmer, etc. then use an appropriate filter (pretty self-explanatory: red filters make the image more red, blue filters more blue, green filters more green, etc.)

Three pictures taken under the same conditions with a digital camera on three different WB settings.

    The film speed is also very important to consider. The faster the film (the higher the ISO rating, the faster the film) the less light that it needs to develop. So if you have 100 ISO film, and 800 ISO film, the 100 ISO film will need a longer shutter-speed or greater aperture to produce the same photograph as the 800 ISO film. What’s the catch? High speed film is grainy. If you’re shooting digital, this still applies to you! Digital cameras have an ISO setting. The same rules apply except that the defect while shooting high-speed is not grain but noise. Use the lowest ISO that your lighting conditions allow.
    There is an exposure compensation setting on both film and digital cameras. It is measured in terms of how many stops (f-number settings) the camera will adjust exposure by, making the photograph lighter or darker. To use, simply set up to take the picture as you normally would and then set the compensation. When and to what degree you should do this, will be covered in another section.
    A couple things apply just to digital photographers: Make sure that your camera is set to both the highest mega-pixel rating possible and the highest quality setting possible (consult your owner’s manual as it differs, but this option is typically found in the menu). This ensures that your photograph will be as clear as possible and that it can be magnified without losing quality. Also, you may have the option to select how your image is stored. If an image is compressed, much of the information which the chip senses will be lost, which can make a photograph lower quality, and limit post processing capabilities. A compressed image is typically stored in the form JPEG as a “.jpg” file. If you store your image as RAW all of the data from the chip will be stored. This can be impractical though. RAW files are much larger than compressed files (you can’t hold as many of them) and they can take a very long time for the camera to process (while your camera is working on saving the RAW, you may have missed a few more photographs). If time and space are not a concern, RAW is the way to go. Lastly, consult your owner’s manual on the sorts of focusing which your camera is capable of (whether it focuses only when you tell it to, manually, all of the time, which points it focuses on, et cetera). Each camera is different, so obviously, I can not elaborate on each one.

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A Beginner's Guide to Wildlife and Nature Photography

Elemental Controls

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