Photography basics, one setting per page
The twenty-five settings and habits that take you from disappointing photos to ones you keep.
A diagram, the classic mistake, and one thing to go try. That's a page.
Photography basics, one setting per page
The twenty-five settings and habits that take you from disappointing photos to ones you keep.
Set in Space Grotesk, Inter and JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font License).
Technique checked against Photography Life and Cambridge in Colour tutorials, Nikon and Canon manufacturer documentation, and Wikipedia's exposure value, sunny 16 and golden hour references.
General guidance only. Your camera's manual is the final word on its own dials.
Your purchase is for personal use only. You do not have redistribution rights: please do not share, resell, or republish this book or its pages.
© 2026 Steve Hodgkiss. All rights reserved. Personal use only; no redistribution rights.
Edition 1.0 · stevehodgkiss.net
Contents
Light and the triangle
Every photo is light through three doors: how wide the lens opens, how long the curtain stays up, and how loudly the signal is amplified. Five pages on the doors and the currency they trade in.
- 01Exposure
- 02Aperture
- 03Shutter speed
- 04The stop
Every photo is made of the same stuff: light hitting a sensor. Three settings decide how much arrives, and how, and together they set the brightness of the picture.
Exposure
Let's say your photos keep coming home disappointing: dark faces, grey skies, thin sunsets. All of that is exposure, the amount of light the camera records. Not one dial but three working together.
The classic mistake is treating the camera's guess as a verdict. The meter aims for average, and most beautiful light is not average.
Understand the three and you can bend any of them: one page each, next.
Brightness is the easy part. The side effects are the photo.
Take the same photo five times, changing one setting each time. Watch nothing but brightness.
Inside every lens is an iris of overlapping blades that opens and closes like the pupil of your eye. The size of that hole is the aperture, written as an f-number.
Aperture
Photography Life describes it exactly like your eye: the iris expands in the dark and shrinks in the sun, and your lens's pupil is the aperture.
The trap is the counter-intuitive numbering: f/16 is the small hole and f/2 the big one. Read it as a fraction, a sixteenth against a half, and it stops feeling backwards.
f/2 gives the soft, separated background portraits are made of; f/16 gives you sharp from front to back for landscapes.
Pick the aperture for the look, then let the shutter pay for it.
Find one subject with depth, a fence or a row of cups. Photograph it at the biggest and smallest f-number your lens allows. Compare the backgrounds.
The shutter is two curtains just in front of the sensor. The first one slides open, the second follows, and light lands on the sensor for the width of time between them.
Shutter speed
Shutter speed is simply how long your camera spends taking the photo, from whole seconds to thousandths of one.
The classic mistake: believing a slow shutter only matters for runners and races. At 1/15 of a second your own heartbeat smears the frame, and the photo comes home soft with nothing moving at all.
Slow is a tool too: water goes milky, car lights become ribbons. But then the camera braces on something that does not breathe, a tripod or a wall.
The shutter trades light for time. Spend it on purpose.
Photograph a tap running at 1/15 and again at 1/500. Rest the camera on the basin edge for the slow one. Keep both.
A stop is photography's unit of trade: double the light or halve it. Every setting moves in stops, so any give in one can be taken back in another.
The stop
Photography Life's definition is the whole idea: a stop is the doubling or halving of the light in an exposure. Wikipedia agrees: one EV, one power-of-two step.
The beginner move to retire: changing one setting and letting brightness drift by accident. Now you can balance the books.
Stop down the aperture for depth, slow the shutter a matching stop to pay for it. Same brightness, different photo.
Learn the pairs: 1/60 and f/11 becomes 1/125 and f/8, and nothing else changed.
Set any scene, then trade stops: close the aperture one stop and slow the shutter one stop. Confirm brightness holds.
Soft photos have three different diseases, and the cure for one does nothing for the other two. Learn to tell them apart at a glance and sharpness stops being luck.
Why photos blur
Photography Life names the three causes of a soft image plainly: camera shake from a slow shutter, motion blur from the subject, and poor focus acquisition.
The diagnostic, at full zoom: sharp background means focus missed, streaks mean the subject moved, an even smear means the camera moved.
Three different prescriptions: move the point, speed the shutter, brace yourself or add light.
Name the blur before you reach for a fix. Guessing wastes good settings on the wrong disease.
Open your last ten rejects and sort them into the three piles. One pile usually holds nearly everything: that is the setting to work on.
Before you press anything, the frame is already a grid: two lines across, two down, four crossings where they meet. Putting things on those lines instead of dead centre is the cheapest upgrade in photography.
Rule of thirds
Cambridge in Colour's phrasing: an image is most pleasing when its subjects sit along the lines that divide it into thirds, both ways, or on their crossings.
The habit to break is the dead-centre one. Everything in the middle makes every photo a passport photo.
Eyes on the top line, horizon on the lower one, and leave the bigger share of the frame to where the subject is looking or walking.
It is called a rule so you can notice yourself breaking it.
Turn on the grid overlay in your viewfinder or phone camera and leave it on for a week. Photograph the same subject centred and on a crossing. You will not go back.
The mode dial answers one question: of the two big settings, which one do you want to hold and which one do you hand to the camera? Nothing on it is a rank or a badge.
Av, Tv, M
Canon's own lesson says it in one line: in Av you set the aperture and the camera sets the shutter speed; in Tv the reverse. Nikon writes the same modes A and S.
The mistake is thinking M means serious. Manual is for light that stays put, a studio or a sunset; chasing both dials at a running child is slower.
Default to Av and choose the look; switch to Tv when the subject moves.
Priority means you keep the decision you care about and delegate the rest.
Spend one walk in Av, choosing only the aperture. The next in Tv, choosing only the shutter.
Every page ends with the same small ask because that is genuinely how this skill is built: one setting at a time, one short walk, one honest look at what came home. Run weekly, the loop compounds.
The weekly loop
Pick one setting per week and photograph only for it: aperture this week, shutter the next, thirds after that. Focus beats coverage.
The mistake is the gear spiral: waiting for a better camera, a better lens, a better season, before practising at all.
Twenty focused minutes most weeks outgrows any occasional grand expedition, and the review step is what turns walks into skill.
You now own every setting on the dial. The rest of the book happens outside, one frame at a time.
Book it in your calendar: one 20-minute walk, one setting from this book, five minutes of review after.