The art behind the exposure triangle
In photography the line between the technical and the Art of a photo is often blurred. It’s hard to be create without knowing technicalities of how it’s done at the same time you could know all the ins and outs of your camera but not be able to take any good photos without being creative and artistic.
The exposure triangle is the first thing you learn in photography. Without getting to technical, it shows how you can control how a photo looks by controlling three things, the size of the lens’ opening, how fast the camera takes the photo and how sensitive to light the camera can be. The key is to use the triangle to create a perfectly exposed photo. The art comes in when you use the triangle with purpose to create a piece of artwork. Controlling how much of the background is blurred (bolkah) or what kind of motion or lack there of you want is all part of the process of creating artwork with the triangle.
Take this photo as an example. It seems like a simple pic but there is a lot of indentions to unpack with just the exposure triangle there are other techniques at play which are out of scope for this post.
This photo shoot was for a book about an artist walking the streets of Cairo (details about the shoot are in the “Commissioned“ collection). Although we were finished we decided to sit and chat at a local Egyptian coffee shop. The artiest pulled out a copy of his book and all of a sudden i noticed we were in a fantastic location for one more photo. It was as if we were in one of the pages in his book. I asked him to hold his book up as if he was reading it.
In terms of the art behind the exposure triangle the aperture (size of the lens’ opening) needed to be opened enough to blur the background but without making it unrecognizable because in addition to the book and the artiest himself the streets of Cairo is also the subject. The shutter speed (how fast the photo is taken) had to be high without making the photo too dark (under exposed) enough to freeze any motion and the ISO (sensitivity to light) could have been high enough to introduce some natural grain but i thought a cleaner more crisp photo would be better to contrast the griminess of the city.
In the hands of an artist, this triangle can give so many different tools to express any emotion, thought or statement the artist wants to make.
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