Everybody welcome back to explain my confide the podcast where we take the questions you always want to ask talk about them in a way That's easy to understand really hosts. I'm Tim. Welcome back. I'm Kevin.
So Kevin today. We're talking about photography Let's start with basics. Can you name a few photography words that everyone should know about they think they should know about secretly Would love explain to you life-life style? Yeah, I mean everyone that's has a smartphone these days is a is basically a photographer, right?
That's right and as you learn more about photography you should familiarize yourself with things like shutter speed ISO and aperture So this is a great topic for today and the basic idea behind those three things is that you want an image that is bright enough to see clearly But not so bright. That's all white and these are the three knobs to control how much brightness you get and each one affects the picture very differently Great. So let's dive in and talk about shutter speed. How does that affect brightness?
Okay? So shutter speed is actually one of the easiest ones to understand It's literally how long the shutter of your camera is open So really short times like one two thousandth of a second get you very little light because the shutter is literally open and closes Within one two thousandth of a second and there's also longer shutter speed times like 30 seconds We're getting a lot of light because the shutter just literally open that whole time Oh, there's pros and cons, right? So shorter times Allow you to freeze the action in place, but the consequences getting very little light rather longer times can produce a blur in anything That moves even a tiny bit generally anything much longer than about one tenth or one thirtieth of a second You gotta hold a camera really steady or on a tripod. Otherwise, you gotta start to see blur Cool that that's very clear and it makes a ton of sense.
How about ISO or ISO? I call it ISO ISO ISO is sensitivity so lower numbers here like 100 mean less sensitivity Which means less brightness and higher numbers like 6400 mean higher sensitivity which means more brightness This is kind of like boosting the game on a microphone for example The more you turn it up the more noise you get in your result in your result the image can look very grainy when you turn up the ISO Another person put like this the ISO is like a volume knob, right? You crank the volume you get a louder sound or a brighter picture I like that analogy both the microphone analogy and that the game is more volume knob I try it's especially relevant when people used to have film cameras, right? Non-digital cameras.
Yes In the old days of your not that long ago When cameras used film ISO or actually ASA as it used to be called was an indication of how sensitive a particular role of film was So if you want to shoot in a somewhat low light situation You might use something like a 400 ISO film, but expect some grain of this to come in But for average light, you know average quality maybe 200 ISO and that 100 ISO will be even better quality than that But you may want to use some flash especially if you're indoors. Okay, now how about aperture? All these weird numbers like f you know 1.8. Yeah, yeah So the third of a final setting here is aperture or f-stop is another way to call it And so lower numbers like f 1.8 mean a wider opening and more brightness higher numbers like f 16 Mean a narrow opening and less brightness Lower numbers basically allow more light that's coming in at odd angles Which will decrease how much of the images in sharp focus also called a shallow depth of field kind of crazy that Book effect is actually very popular in portrait photos versus higher numbers or with a smaller opening will cause more of the image to be In focus together.
So that cool, you know portrait mode things that a lot of you phones have They're actually using multiple cameras to kind of simulate the effect of a wide aperture Where the only the subject is in focus everything else in the background is like a creamy blur very helpful So now we talk about all three of these how do you optimize them together? Yeah, so you pretty much always want an image whose brightest points are almost but not quite 100% white and whose darkest points are almost But not quite 100% black and you could basically play with these three adjustments in different ratios in order to achieve that I also get a very different image depending on how you combine them. That's artistic part play around it So, you know where you can find a lot of these artists are on podcast Oh, yeah, actually a lot of photography podcasts out there. Yes, are they like teaching people photography skills or cataloging the lives of photographers?
Well, there are great shows in both categories personally I love a particular podcast that talks about the profession of business and wedding photography in particular It's called creative rising and it's by this wonderful husband and wife team called Jeff and Aaron Youngren. Oh, okay So creative rising check out some of their episodes in the past It's really nice how they describe all the ins and outs of running of the top three business You know, there are loads of behind the scenes to running a creative business I just never even thought about exactly so you know, if that's of interest to our listeners I'd highly recommend checking it out. It's creative rising by the young friends. It's felt young M s and yeah, it's a great other podcast if you've enjoyed some of this conversation and want to know what it's like to be a photographer Now Kevin, it seems like you do know a lot of fun facts about photography any others that come to mind you want to share about listeners?
Yeah, sure. How about you do you know why it feels like people in old photos never seem to be smiling? No, why is that? The popular theory is that people had bad teeth back then.
I didn't want to show teeth But actually yeah, but I didn't think about that one. Uh-huh, but actually because of the way old photos were taken They had a very long shutter speed and thus people actually had to sit still for a very long period of time Otherwise, we're gonna get a very blurry photo and spamming for a longer time can actually be kind of hard to do So people kind of make that neutral face and would just stare at a camera for a longer time like they were posing for a painting So exactly exactly until the picture was finished taking okay. What any other questions that you got a surprise? Yeah, you also know how they first invented color photography?
No, tell me essentially It was around the same time they invented the whole RGB scale someone someone figured out that our eyes mainly understood three colors red Green and blue and they put a red green blue filter on the camera took three separate photos and when you combine together you actually get a pretty impressive color What? Very interesting. Yeah, so how about this final interesting question that I have for you and let's close on this one Why do some museums and occasionally fancy judges not allow flash photography? Maybe because it's kind of rude That's it.
That's the other thing. I can think of two more legit reasons The first major one is that it could damage some of these paintings, you know, especially ones made a made-in tempera Which is made of eggs. It's generally kind of used pretty often early Renaissance paintings And also oil paints will naturally fade over time and actually the flash accelerates this It's almost everything but it's kind of raw umber. It's kind of brown color That's why most oil paintings have that brown tone to it And that's the only color that could keep its vibrancy over the years.
Okay, the flash accelerates the degradation of these paintings The second reason I can think of is that museums often do not own a collection on display So there might be some image rights to the collection on our own by the individual and their retaining ownership of the art So they don't want pictures that spreading. That makes sense. I'm in a lot today Did you learn something new if you did send us a tweet at ELI5 the podcast send us requests for future episodes or send us a thumbs up on Twitter? As always a big thank you to the subreddit explain like I'm fine.
See you all next week