![]() You can however, look at a photo, and say that it could be a stop brighter, or a stop darker. For example, you can't look at a photo and describe it as having been shot at 12 stops. By relative, I mean that a stop can only be judged in relation to an absolute exposure. ![]() What is a stop? Well, it's essentially a relative measure of light. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? Knowledge is power let's get into it. You will forever understand your equipment better, be able to make better photographic small talk, and wrapping your head around this subject will only take you a minute. Name your favorite adjective, but I will argue that understanding these minutae actually will help you create better images. The subject might strike you as too complex, esoteric, granular. Why is ƒ/2.8 a stop, and why does a stop of ƒ/2.8 signify a bigger diameter than an f-stop of ƒ/4? Our reluctance to recognize the powerhouse that we can unleash by truly understanding our aperture is making our images worse!Īperture confuses people, especially the f-stop scale-it doesn't seem to make any sense. Aperture though, is uniquely king over these two other settings-and its importance is generally overlooked by most photographers. Of course ISO and shutter speed are important-otherwise they wouldn't have been introduced to begin with. OK, this headline is purposely clickbaity. Aperture is the only setting that matters Thanks for reading! Joking, you're not getting off that easily. If you got that right, then well, you probably already know everything, you may as well just be done here. Sorry, nope! That's not how f-numbers work at all. If your intuition is like mine, you'll probably do some naive math like some very naive multiplication, and come up with the wrong answer. Here's a seemingly straightforward question that many will find to be remarkably counterintuitive: Under critique, though, how well do these beliefs hold up? Well, let's start off with a little quiz. Most of us probably feel as though we know enough about aperture to get by. How did they do it? What did they know? Having joined the photography movement during the digital era, there was so much about the internal mechanics of exposure that I was not aware of. Before digital metering, there was no automatic way to know how to expose your images!Īnd I started really really obsessing over this concept. Before the era of digital photography, the phenomenon I had just weathered through would have been completely normal to the average photographer. Yes, 3 stops, this was in the early 2010's none of that crazy, 20 stop exposure compensation stuff that's available today.Īfter my fear began to settle, I started to think. The modern era has stressed the importance of shooting RAW over JPEGs, a law I luckily abided by, so I had 3 stops in either direction to pull my exposure up and down. I scrambled my way home, plugged the images into the computer, aaaaaand *drumroll*. I'd snap images furiously, as if I had a clue what I was doing, and then a wedding guest would walk up to me: There would be an important event, say, the bride performing the bouquet toss. The only way I can recount the experience was that it was like reading while blind. Everything else functioned fine-the camera would still fire and capture shots perfectly, but, I had no idea what my shots looked like or if they were exposed correctly! Years ago, I ran into an issue during a wedding in which the electronic displays on my camera stopped working. If you want to skip right ahead to the point: aperture and it's relation to prisming. The Ultimate Guide to Prism Photography has all you'll need to get started. The full details explaining use of guide numbers are below the calculator.This blog post is the first in a three part series explaining how photographers can use prisms like Fractals to capture creative images. Guide Number is a tool to determine exposure of direct flash with manual flash power levels. ![]() Even if you always only use TTL metering of flash, the calculator can be useful to show sample capabilities of your flash at the same settings. The concept is still very valid and useful, and is still a fundamental for understanding flash. In the old days (including flash bulbs), guide number was all we had. There are also other ways: we might use metered TTL, or a handheld flash meter, or just trial and error works well (for one flash) with the digital LCD preview. The reference base is a known accurate Guide Number for one situation (with specified ISO and flash head zoom mm), from which other situations can be calculated. ![]() Guide Number = Distance x fstop (values which actually give a proper exposure)į/stop = Guide Number / Distance (aperture for other distances)ĭistance = Guide Number / fstop (distances for other apertures)
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