This is the time when little girls and boys are learning to play America’s favorite pastime, baseball.
Some of our family’s favorite pictures are the ones I took while our kids were playing baseball.
In 1996, I was shooting Fujifilm Provia transparency film at ISO 100. When you put this into the camera, it sets the ISO. Then I had only two other controls for exposure. I could control the Aperture, which was an iris like your eyes, opening and closing to let in more or less light. The other control for exposure was shutter speed. Shutter speed controls how long the camera leaves the door covering the film open.
To master photography so that you can take great pictures of your family and get consistent results, you have to master the Exposure Triangle.
I hope this picture helps you understand what you need. ISO, SHUTTER, & APERTURE individually control the exposure. You must know instinctively when you turn the dial, which way will make it darker and which way will make it lighter.
When you look through the viewfinder of your camera and are in “M” mode (manual), your camera will display a meter along the edges of the screen.
You will adjust one or all three controls until the meter reads in the middle, indicating proper exposure.
Some meters have numbers like the Canon, and others, like the Nikon, have hash marks. As you can see when you look at the two side by side, as I have here, where the number and hash are located, it is precisely 1 stop from the following number to the left or right.
A stop is a measure of exposure relating to the doubling or halving of the amount of light.
No matter which way you turn the ISO, Aperture, or Shutter-Speed dial [if analog], when you move it, the distance between the number or hash, as shown below, increases or decreases the value by 1/2 the amount of light. We call that moving it 1-Stop.
You can buy a Black, Gray, & White target to use when setting your exposure. If you took a picture with equal amounts of the three in the photo, then your histogram should look like the one below.
Most photographers use an 18% Gray target, which looks like just the middle Gray. As long as the meter shows 0 and not + or–, the photo will give you a histogram with a spike in the middle.
So if all you want to do is take photos of your kids playing ball and you want them to be well-exposed, then you have to master the exposure triangle.
Then you will know how to stop the ball as I have done in these photos and have just what I want in focus, which is the ball and the faces.