How To Take Great Blog Pictures – Your Camera’s Manual Settings
As some of you might know – as it is splashed all over my Instagram masquerading as a fashion accessory – I was recently given the blogger-friendly Olympus Pen E-PL7 Lite – £499 via John Lewis – to play around with. I absolutely adore my Olympus Pen is as it is a great piece tech for on-the-go blogging, it is pocket sized, takes professional quality photographs, has a great array of in-built filters and is POCKET SIZED!!!
Though the technical aspects of photography might seem a bit overwhelming; and you might be tempted to switch the camera dial to “auto” and just leave it there forever, learning the key elements to your camera will help you gain control of your photos and get better results. Without my blog I don’t think I would have discovered my passion for photography and as I’m feeling very inspired right now I thought I should start up a ‘How To Take Great Blog Pictures’ Series that will center around tips, tricks and advice that I hope will help you take better beauty, food and fashion pictures.
As a lot of bloggers do get a lot of flak about transparency, I’m going to say this once and move on. Though Olympus UK were lovely enough to give me this camera, this post is not sponsored by Olympus UK (or Nikon) in anyway. I’ve just been getting a lot more questions than I usually do asking about my camera, how I set up products for a picture and the different ways I light my pictures so I thought this would be a great time to do a photography series as there seems to be a lot of interest.
Then & Now
Everyone had to start somewhere right? . . .right???
The picture quality in 2011 vs. 2015 was just so BAD, I deleted a large chunk of my earlier posts but I just wanted to quickly illustrate how much my photography style and knowledge has changed and improved from 2011 to 2015 so if you are a new blogger or budding photographer don’t feel that your pictures won’t get better – it will – just realise that it will take time so be patient and enjoy the learning process.
ISO
ISO refers to how sensitive your camera is to the light around you. The lower your ISO setting is the less sensitive your camera is to light and the higher your ISO setting is, the more sensitive it is to the light. I find that if you set your ISO quite low (below 400), you get very crisp, rich colours in your photographs but if you set it quite high, your pictures are much lighter and brighter but you start competing with “noise” – a grainy texture – in your photos.
ISO = Your camera’s level of sensitivity to available light.
Every camera has something called a “Base ISO“, this is the lowest ISO number that your camera’s sensor can go and still produce a high quality picture without noise. On my Pen Lite, I can go down to an ISO 200 but on my Nikon D5300 - £560.38 via John Lewis – I can go down a little further to an ISO 100.
When it comes to ISO I think the most important thing to understand is that each step between the numbers doubles the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor to available light. So ISO 200 is twice as sensitive to light than ISO 100. ISO 400 is twice as sensitive to light than ISO 200 WHICH makes ISO 400 four times more sensitive to light than ISO 100.
In an ideal blogging world, I would stick to my camera’s base ISO all the time as I would be shooting in natural light and would get the highest image quality possible but it’s winter in the UK and I have to work with very poor lighting so an ISO 100 just wouldn’t be practical for me as I have to shoot indoors with an artificial light source but an ISO between 200 and 400 would.
APERTURE
Playing around with my camera’s aperture settings is one of my favourite things to do as I feel that the right aperture setting can really add dimensions to an image. Aperture controls the amount of light that goes into your camera through that big hole in your lens – surprisingly the hole isn’t just there for fashion – and it also controls how focussed the distance between your background and your point of focus is aka Depth of Field aka how to make your image background blurry/out of focus.
Aperture is measured in f-stops and works in inverse values. A small f.stop number will give a shallow depth of field (very blurry background) and a very bright picture while a large f.stop number will give you a darker picture with a wide depth of field.
Getting the right depth of field depends entirely on what lens you are using e.g If you were using the Nikon 50mm f/1.8G lens – £174.32 via F&F – the lowest f-stop you could go down to would be f/1.8 but you could go as high as f/20 if you wanted to.
I tend to shoot all my fashion outfits at f/ 1.8 as I like the focus to be on the pieces I am wearing rather than the random guy walking behind me but I feel that the majority of beauty and food shots work better at an aperture setting between f/3.2 and f/5.6.
SHUTTER SPEED
Shutter Speed affects the amount of light your camera captures in your photographs. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light you allow to hit your camera’s image sensor. Shutter speed is measured in seconds or fractions of a second. The easiest way to grasp this concept is that the BIGGER the shutter speed number is, the FASTER the speed is but your image will be DARKER.
As a rule, I don’t ever shoot with a shutter speed lower than 1/60 otherwise my pictures start to get very blurry as my camera starts reacting to my hand movements – more commonly known as “camera shake” – On the rare occasions that I need to shoot with a shutter speed lower than 1/60, I would need to go grab a tripod to keep my camera completely still.
I’m going to stop my post here as I don’t want to chuck too much information at you at one time BUT I really hope you liked the first post in my photography series. I would really love to get some feedback from you before I start working on my next post ‘How To Take Great Blog Pictures: With Your Phone” so feel free to drop me a comment below or to Tweet me at @Epiphanniea
