OK, so you bought the DSLR. It’s big. But you are still getting the underexposed pictures at the beach where your kid looks like she’s standing in a deep dark shadow while the ocean looks bright and beautiful behind her. This is starting to annoy you. What to do?
Taking Better Snapshots: Part 1: Learn to Shoot in Manual
Part 1: Take the camera off auto, put it in manual and learn to read the in-camera meter (or buy a separate meter or get very very good at eyeballing it). Otherwise, you have a very expensive point and shoot.
When you look in the view finder you’ll see a grid thus:
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The one in the middle is “correct” exposure, but for close ups of pale skin you actually want the slider a bit towards overexposure because some people are just whiter than the percentage of grey that the camera uses to determine “right”.
Part 2: Once you are in Manual get a stuffed animal or an apple or anything less mobile and more patient than a child and start taking lots of pictures, changing the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed settings for each one to see how the triangle of exposure changes the final picture.
ISO is how fast the film will record the picture. The higher the number, the faster the film. The lower the number, the crisper the picture will look.
F-stop is how wide your aperture is. The wider the aperture, the smaller the number. f/1.8 is a wider aperture than f/5.6. The wider the aperture the more light will be let in, the shallower the in focus area will be, and the more the background will be out of focus. It’s hard to nail your focus with anything smaller than 4.0 until you practice rather a lot.
Shutter speed is how long the camera lets in light. My hand is too shaky to handle anything below 1/125 th of a second. The loose rule of thumb is take the size of your lens (say, 50mm), double it (to 100) and make sure your shutter speed has that number as the lowest denominator (1/100).
Part 3: Practice with your kids on an easy lighting day. What’s easy? Overcast. When the sun is behind the clouds you won’t have to worry about shadows in their faces, bright sun patches behind them or backlighting.
