Exposure, Aperture, and ISO: The Painfully Misunderstood Basics of Photography

Let’s just go ahead and say it: most articles about exposure read like they were written by a robot who spent too much time on a photography forum and not enough time actually making photographs. They spit out definitions with all the liveliness of a tax form, and while technically accurate, they tend to miss the thing that really matters—what it feels like to actually shoot, to wrestle with light, to ruin frames, and to sometimes, just sometimes, get it spectacularly right.

So let's kill the formality and talk about the three-headed monster that is exposure: Aperture, ISO, and Shutter Speed. Or, as I like to call them, the holy trinity of either making or absolutely mangling your image.

Exposure: The Myth of "Perfectly Exposed"

Exposure is, in the simplest and simultaneously most frustrating sense, how light or dark your image is. Too much light? Washed out. Not enough? Mud. But here's the thing: what counts as "correct" exposure isn't a meter reading. It’s not what your camera says. It’s what you say. It’s whether the shot feels right. If you're photographing a funeral in the rain and the picture comes out looking like a toothpaste ad, you've missed the point.

Cameras don’t understand intent. They don’t understand poetry. They just understand 18% gray. So if you want your images to carry weight, you're going to have to push and pull your exposure settings around with full knowledge that you're breaking rules on purpose. Good. That’s where the art starts. Thats where you’ll learn to take killer portraits, specatular and awe-inducing headshots, and penultimate portraiture.

Aperture: Not Just a Number, But a Choice

The aperture is the hole in your lens that opens and closes like a mechanical iris, letting in more or less light. It’s measured in these cryptic little numbers called f-stops (f/1.4, f/2.8, f/8, etc.) that don’t really make intuitive sense unless you spend time doing math or making photographs—and I suggest the latter.

Here’s the useful part: the lower the number, the more light gets in, and the blurrier your background gets. That dreamy portrait with the eyeballs sharp and everything else melting into blur? That’s a wide aperture. That tack-sharp landscape where you can see ants on the mountain? Narrow aperture.

But—and this is a massive but—you don’t always want the prettiest background blur. Sometimes you want context. Sometimes you need more in focus because the story calls for it. The trick isn’t to memorize what f-stop to use. It’s to know what you want your viewer to feel. Then dial it accordingly.

Also, wide apertures let in more light - which is crucial for someone like a professional event photographer. So if you're shooting in a cave or, say, anywhere in Brooklyn after 5pm (the nice thing about shooting past 5pm is at least you won’t have to worry about whether to choose between hard or soft photography lighting it’s universally softjust be aware your margin for focus is razor-thin, so if you miss, you miss.

ISO: The Necessary Evil

ISO is your sensor’s sensitivity to light. Technically. But in real terms? It’s the emergency lever. The booster rocket. The late-night compromise. It’s what you touch when there’s no light, you’re wide open on aperture, and your shutter is already dangerously slow. It’s a get-out-of-jail card, but the kind where you come out looking a little roughed up.

Low ISO (100-400) = clean, beautiful files. Raise that sucker past 1600 and you start dancing with the digital devil—noise, grain, loss of detail. And yet... some of the best, most emotional photos ever taken were noisy as hell. Don’t let the pixel-peepers scare you. If the moment matters, bump the ISO and shoot the photo.

Shutter Speed: The Unsung Hero (or Silent Killer)

Shutter speed is how long your sensor is exposed to light. 1/1000 of a second? You’ll freeze a bullet. 1/10 of a second? Your dog just became a ghost.

Fast shutters = frozen time. Slow shutters = motion blur. Choose wisely. Or recklessly. Just know what you’re getting into. Want sharp images handheld? Stay above 1/125s. Shooting a dancer on stage? 1/500s minimum. Trying to capture light trails on a New York street at midnight? Slow it down to seconds and grab a tripod (or pray your arms are made of stone).

The Exposure Triangle: Your Frenemy

Everyone loves talking about the exposure triangle whether professionals or hobbyist photographers. It sounds authoritative, like something you might learn in a seminar next to a guy in a fleece vest. But it’s not sacred. It’s just a framework. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO all interact. If one goes up, another has to go down, unless you want your image to be brighter or darker.

Want a blurry background? Open your aperture.
Need to freeze motion? Speed up your shutter.
Shooting in a dark alley? Raise the ISO.

You juggle these depending on what matters most for the shot. Not what the internet says. What the shot needs.

Practical Example: The Portrait at Dusk

Let’s say you’re shooting a portrait in golden hour, and it’s fading fast.

You want the subject sharp and the background creamy. Aperture: f/1.8.
But it’s dimming. You can’t shoot slower than 1/100s handheld. Shutter: 1/100s.
You look through the viewfinder and it’s still too dark. Time to swallow your pride. ISO: 800.

Boom. You have a shot. Might be a little noisy. But the mood? On point.

Now imagine doing that every day, thousands of times, until it becomes instinct. That’s when the triangle stops being geometry and starts being poetry.

Final Thoughts: Shoot First, Define Later

If you're still reading, here's the only advice that matters: shoot. Shoot all the time. Break the rules. Screw up the exposure and find out what happens. Use ISO 3200 in daylight just to see what it looks like. Shoot with your aperture wide open and learn the heartbreak of a soft focus. Try everything, then do it again.

Because the only real way to understand exposure is to live it—to take thousands of frames that are too dark, too bright, too blurry, too noisy, and then suddenly... one that isn’t. One that sings.

And when it happens, you’ll know. Not because the histogram is centered or the meter says ±0.0. But because you felt it in your gut.

And that’s the shot that counts.

Exposure, Aperture, and ISO: The Painfully Misunderstood Basics of Photography