Full Stops - Nikon D5100 Experience Manual

Nikon D5100 Experience
when working in low light and you wish to make sure the shutter speed is not too slow for
obtaining a sharp image while hand-holding the camera.
ISO: As a rule of thumb you can start off with the following settings, and then check your
aperture and shutter speed to confirm they are in the range you wish. Through experience you
will get a better, instinctive feel for which ISO to use in which lighting situation.
ISO Settings to start with:
Sunny day: 100 – 200 ISO
Cloudy day or in the shade: 400 – 800 ISO
Evening or indoors without flash: 800 – 3200 ISO
In A mode you are selecting the aperture and the camera is selecting the appropriate shutter
speed to create the proper exposure. Since you are not controlling the shutter speed in A mode,
you need to keep your eye on the shutter speed that the camera is selecting (in the viewfinder or
on the back LCD Monitor) and make sure that it is, typically, at least 1/125 or faster, depending
on your lens and subject motion. If the shutter speed the camera selects is slower than you
desire, you have to increase the ISO and then the shutter speed that the camera chooses will
increase, because you have in effect made the sensor more sensitive to the light. In S mode you
are selecting the shutter speed and the camera is selecting the appropriate aperture to create the
proper exposure. Since you are not controlling the aperture in S mode, you need to observe what
aperture the camera is choosing. If you desire a smaller aperture size raise the ISO and the
aperture that the camera selects will be smaller in size.

Full Stops

As a brief aside, if you recall from above some of the Custom Settings involved full stops, 1/2
stops and 1/3 stops (or steps as the Nikon manuals identify them). Books about exposure will
also talk about stops. That was probably the point where your head started to hurt and you put
down the book. And you will hear about stops when using flash or even certain filters like
neutral density or polarizing filters. Photographers always want you to know about stops and
exposure values (EV) because it is sometimes complicated, hard earned knowledge that they had
to learn and they want you to suffer too.
In the days of film cameras, photographers easily learned what the full stops were because they
were listed on dials on their camera or on the aperture rings on their lenses. Now we typically
just see numbers on the screen or in the viewfinder, and users may not know which ones are the
traditional full stops and which are the 1/2 stops or 1/3 stops. So below are the traditional full
stops for apertures, shutter speeds, and ISO.
Apertures:
f/1.4 f/2 f/2.8 f/4 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 f/16 f/22 f/32
Shutter Speeds, in seconds:
1/1000 1/500 1/250 1/125 1/60 1/30 1/15 1/8 1/4 1/2 1
ISO:
100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800
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