Understanding the camera.

The camera, in terms general knowledge on how to use it, I have always been a bit weak, so I've made a conscious effort to really improve this, consistently researching all the functions, as well as buying my own camera and practising - seeing results for myself and seeing what needs changing in terms of things such as the ISO, aperture and shutter speed to improve picture quality. As well as the conceptual tools I've already covered in an attempt to further enhance my knowledge of cinematography, there are still areas I haven't covered, going into further detail of the technicalities of cinematography. This is more so focusing more on the camera linguistics rather than onset lighting etc, such as exposure, depth of field and dynamic range.

There are three things that control exposure; ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Though for my realisation task, it's only really ISO and aperture that are relevant to my idea, so I will focus primarily on them here in order to improve my understanding.

ISO

ISO stands for International Standards Organisation, with the 'ISO rating' ranging from 25 to 3200 - this determines the light sensitivity. The image quality tends to be smoother the lower the ISO rating, with it becoming 'noisier' the higher the rating. Essentially, the more sensitive the image sensor is, the harder it has to work in order to produce an image, therefore producing more 'digital noise'.

Comparison between a noisy image and a smooth image.






In terms of my own realisation task, since my scene will be lit with low key lighting, I'll need to be aware of the fact that my ISO setting may need lowering in order to keep the digital noise away from my final images.


APERTURE

A lens's aperture is ultimately determined by the size of the diaphragm opening - this is how focused light passes through the lens. Whilst image quality is based on the ISO rating, the aperture is based on f-stops. At a smaller f-stop, the diaphragm is larger, therefore letting significantly more light into the lens, whereas at a bigger f-stop, significantly less light moves into the camera. So at a smaller f-stop, for example something like f/2, you would say that it is a large aperture, and a larger f-stop, such as f/22 is considered a small aperture.

This is where shallow and large depths of fields come into it. With a large aperture, in image quality we see the main focal point in a sharp focus quality, with a blurred background, yet with a small aperture we see the whole image in focus and a good sharp quality. Something such as portrait or nature photography, is typically used with a large aperture/shallow depth of field, and something such as landscape photography would typically use a small aperture/deep depth of field.