If you've been practicing photography professionally for any amount of time or even if you're an advanced amateur, you've been asked by friends, family, or strangers if you could teach them how to use their camera. Often, this results in the conversation devolving into bits and pieces about apertures, exposure triangles, and using manual mode, ending with a deer-in-headlights look from the unsuspecting inquisitor. Well, here's a new tool to help teach them how to use that "nice camera" to "take nice pictures" without breaking the bank. And if you're one of the people needing help to switch off Auto mode, this is the tool for you.
London-based Animator Simon Roberts has developed a clever new interactive tool called "Photography Mapped" that helps users visualize a camera's settings and outcomes. Most photographers would say that switching (and sticking) to manual mode is the only real way to learn how the camera processes light, but this online tool provides an easy way to give it a shot and see the real-time effects of adjusting not only shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, but of adjusting light as well, all without picking up a camera. I'd bet if you played with this tool with your camera in hand, it would be even more effective.
The tool is really intuitive, and I think it could be really helpful for people who are just starting out in photography. You can even throw the tool into Auto mode, which shows how the camera chooses different settings, and the effects those settings have on the image. In Manual mode, you have full control over light, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, and the tool demonstrates how those choices affect depth of field, image noise, image blur, and more. It would be interesting for there to be Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority modes available to play with as well, but I guess we can't have everything.
I’ve tried to show what’s happening so you can build up a simple mental picture about why various settings change your image as much as what they do to your image.
And if you want a hard copy of the tool to hang on your wall for when you're not on a computer, you can buy prints of the diagram as well. Nifty.
[via Digital Trends]
