Camera Settings

Hello Gunpla Meisters! It's been quite a while but here's new tutorial for you. I'll be teaching you the 3 basic settings of a camera (well, a DSLR to be exact). These 3 settings are known as the 3 pillars of photography. ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. I'll only be doing a brief explanation though, you're going to have to find out a little bit more about them if you wanna learn more.


So before we begin, here's a look at my photo booth. I only used 1 light source and a white background. You can make a background out of white paper or carton, the one I used here is a Bakuc Spray Booth.

Ok, so apparently, some people have a tendency to use flash. As much as possible, don't. Why? Take a look.

As you can see, flash has a tendency to reflect light on shiny surfaces which could make the photo pretty much obscure. Another is if you have insufficient lighting, shadows will appear behind your subject and that just doesn't look too nice. So it's understood right? Don't use flash if you don't have to.


Before we start though, here's where you can find the settings.

If you want to change the Aperture values, set it to "A". For shutter speed, set it to "S". As for ISO, it differs really from camera to camera but most likely it's in the settings menu.


-ISO-
Basically, ISO is the level of sensitivity of your camera to available light. Lower ISO makes the camera less sensitive to light thus resulting to darker images. Higher ISO makes the camera more sensitive to light thus resulting to lighter images but there's a draw back. There would be "image noise or grain" which is a fancy way of saying that the image quality would be bad and fuzzy. So here's a comparison of different ISO values.

ISO 100

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 1600

So which ISO value is the best? The basic rule is to use the lowest possible ISO to reduce noise. I like to use ISO 100-400 for outdoor shots and ISO 800 for indoor shots. The photos I took during GBWC 2014 are all set to ISO 800.

-Aperture-

Aperture isn't really easy to explain, but I'll try to make it simple. Much like our eyes, cameras also have a pupil as well. Aperture is the value of how much the pupil would open. What aperture does is it controls depth of field. The values are represented by "f-stop". The higher the value, the better the depth of field. Values are in reverse though where f/1.4 is larger than f/2.8. Here are some comparisons of aperture settings.

f/4.8

f/5.6

f/7.1

f/10

If you're wondering why the images get darker at lower values, it's because aperture also controls how much light gets into the retina. Higher values lets more light in while lower values lets less light in. For me, the best would be using the highest f-stop value possible. Mine is f/4.8

-Shutter Speed-
Shutter speed is how fast the camera opens and closes its retina. Simply put, how fast it takes a photo. Faster shutter speed can freeze moving objects in the photo while slower shutter speed allows for motion blur. Shutter speed also affects how much light gets into the retina. Faster shutter speed produces darker images while slower shutter speed produces lighter images. The draw back though for using a slower shutter speed is motion blur, so if you're not using a tripod and you have shaky hands, then the still image would be blurry. This is the setting that I often change when adjusting lighting since it doesn't produce image noise. The values are represented in seconds. Here are some samples of different shutter speeds.

1/50

1/25

1/10

1/5

1/100

1/150

1/200

Since we're photographing Gunpla and these don't exactly move, you should change the shutter speed settings according to the lighting. If it's dark, use a slower shutter speed such as 1/25 or 1/10. If there's sufficient lighting, use faster speeds such 1/50 up to 1/200 and so on.

For those of you who have doubts whether not to use a flash and to those wondering what image noise is, have a look at these next two photos. I've turned off my main light and simply relied on my camera settings to have a photo with decent lighting (PS, it's pretty dark without the main light and without proper settings, you won't be able to see the image properly).

This first image is using ISO 3200, 1/50 Shutter Speed and f/5.6 Aperture

The lighting has been adapted to a fairly decent amount where we can at least see the Gunpla. But as you can see, there is image noise in the photo due to the usage of a high ISO value.

This second image is using ISO 800, 1/13 Shutter Speed and f/5.6 Aperture

As you can see, results are better than the first. Lighting has also adapted at a decent amount and there is very minimal noise compared to the first image. The downside though is that I had to take several photos since it's harder to control with a slower shutter speed. Motion blur appears and you'll need to have steady hands to fix this issue.

And that's it for this tutorial! Once again, thanks for reading, stay tuned for the next tutorials and Happy Building :D