Hi everybody, welcome to Episode 11 of the photography explained podcast. In this episode 10 photography things explained quickly.
I’m your host Rick and each week I’ll try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 10 minutes without the irrelevant details. My aim is to explain things in just enough detail to help us with our photography and no more.
And a few changes on this episode. I’m going to be stumbling less than in the previous take, which I got nine minutes into and realised I was talking absolute rubbish. So I’ve just deleted that and started again.
Yeah, I want to broaden things out a little bit more. And there are a few other things I want to say.
Such as this.
Why is it when I put my microphone and headphones carefully in my desk drawer, when I come to take them out again to record the next episode, like I’ve just done, why are they tangled up? How does that happen? Is there a device or app or something that just goes around tangling up cables just to annoy us?
That’s what happened.
Anyway, Episode 11 double figures plus one – delighted to be here.
You can listen to the episode here
Or keep on reading. Or do both. Entirely up to you!
Now you would have thought now I’m on episode 11 that I could say the word photography, but we’ll see how it goes. So with my Yorkshire tea, let’s get into this.
The 10 photography things explained quickly are
- Exposure
- Metering
- File format
- JPEG
- RAW
- AF
- Depth of field
- Focal length
- Focus
- White Balance
1 What is exposure?
Exposure is the combination of the three settings aperture, shutter, and ISO that are used to create a photograph. Now this is recording the light in a scene.
So in a correct exposure, you will have pretty much what you were looking at when you took the photo.
So if it’s too dark, the photo will be underexposed, and you got something wrong.
If it’s too light, it’s overexposed.
Exposure is the process of recording the light levels of a scene in a photo.
Right, there we go. So that was number one.
And now I will start my stopwatch to make sure I do 10 minutes on these 10 things.
2 Metering
Cameras have light meters in them. I think I’m right in saying that every camera has a meter of one form or another to record the correct levels of light.
Metering is the camera recording the levels of light to give you the correct exposure. Now there are various degrees of advanced metering. It doesn’t matter which exposure mode you’re using.
Sorry, I’ve gone into another thing I didn’t want to. But metering is the process of the camera recording the levels of light to give you a correctly (or not) exposed photograph.
Let’s move on
3 File format.
Now this was one that went disastrously last time. So I’m going to try and explain a bit better. You might see the term file formats, and then lots and lots of different types of file formats. It’s just the file type.
As a photograph is taken as it’s saved onto a memory card normally, or if it’s in a phone, it is saved to the built-in memory.
An iPhone saves a photograph and a JPEG.
Now last time I tried to record this, I couldn’t even remember what JPEG stood for. So I’m going to try again here because this is number four.
4 What is JPEG?
JPEG stands for joint, photographic, now I can’t remember it – that is shocking. And I’m not clever enough to do a quick Google search and keep talking – doesn’t really matter. What JPEG stands for is really irrelevant.
Post podcast recording note – JPEG is Joint Photographic Experts Group – now we all know!
What is important is that JPEG is a universal file format. So if you take a photograph as a JPEG and send it to pretty much anybody, they’ll be able to open it. Now when you take a photograph in JPEG file format, the camera does an amount of processing on it.
If you don’t want to do that, and you want to do all the processing yourself, then what you do is read on.
5 What is RAW?
Raw doesn’t stand for anything. It should stand for something – I find this a little bit disappointing, and I’m going to try my food analogy again here in a minute.
When you take a photo using the raw file format, there is no processing applied to the image. When I say there’s no processing applied, there must be some to create a photo from the light coming through the lens onto a sensor – something must happen to make a photo. But there are no adjustments. It’s recording what it saw.
There is a very tiny bit of processing in there, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. But a RAW photo is a RAW photo – like the raw ingredients of a meal.
You could say that a JPEG is those raw components once they’ve been cooked. Does that make any sense? Or am I making it worse?
RAW files cannot be read by anybody like a JPEG file can.
So what you would ordinarily do if you take photos in the RAW file format, once you’ve done all your editing, you can export them as a JPEG, and then you can send them to anybody (and this is what I do). Okay, so that’s file format, JPEG, and RAW.
There are lots of other file formats, but this is the vast majority covered in one go. Moving on
6 AF
AF stands for autofocus. There are two types of focus in a camera, manual focus and autofocus. Now, if you can turn off the autofocus, and you’ve never tried manual focus, try it.
Back in the day, when I got my first SLR, we didn’t have autofocus. We had manual focus. And that was it.
You just had to get it right or not. I was fortunate to own a camera called the Canon AL1 which had something (I think) called focus assist. We are talking back in the 80s now – yep, all that time ago. And what happened, it was still manual focus. But when you got the image in focus, according to the bit in the middle of the camera, a green light came on. It was brilliant. in it. It was the first technological advance I witnessed in photography that was significant.
Nowadays, of course, we all love autofocus. And apart from the absolute purists who won’t use autofocus, and insist on using manual focus, none of us use manual focus.
And let’s be honest, why would you? Why make things more difficult when there’s amazing technology there that can do the job for you quicker and better than you can? Well, that’s my take on it anyway. Not everybody would agree with that, but such is life.
Moving on,
7 Depth of field.
There are a lot of terms in photography, which if we were starting again now, we wouldn’t call them that. Depth field is one of them. Depth of field is the amount of a photograph that is sharp, going from the front to the very back of the photo.
With a shallow depth of field, you have one part of the photograph in focus and the rest will be out of focus or blurry.
With a large depth of field, more of the photograph will be sharp.
Now depth of field is changed by changing the aperture on the lens. And it’s related to focal length, which I’ll come on to next. This is one of the problems really trying to explain these things because I can’t think of anything in photography that I can explain without having to explain something else which is just as complicated and baffling.
So depth of field is what you could call depth of sharpness, I prefer that.
I do architectural photography and construction photography. I pretty much always want everything in sharp focus unless I’m focusing on a detail, so it’s not a big concern to me.
8 Focal length
Focal length relates to depth of field but I’ll touch on that in a minute. The focal length is the focal length of a camera lens.
The best way I can explain this is that a 50mm lens on a full-frame camera is what’s known as a standard focal length. And that is very similar to how we see the world through our eyes.
So 50mm, full-frame sensor, standard view – that’s how we see things.
Now if we go with a wide angle focal length, 50mm is standard, if we have say a 25mm focal length, That gives you a wider depth of view so it’s called a wide angle lens.
If we go with a longer focal length, say 200mm, this is a telephoto focal length, and you are seeing less of the view, and it feels like it’s closer to you.
Again, focal length and depth of field have a very close relationship.
9 Focus
Focus is where you tell the camera to focus, as in which bit you want sharp. On my Canon 6D, I have 11 focus points. And I tend to focus using one which I select for each photo.
I work the rest out from there.
I think the Canon EOS R has something like 4000 focus points, I can’t work that out! How can you have 4000 things in focus at the same time?
But then again, maybe that’s just because I’m stupid.
So focus is what you’re focusing the camera at. And it’s normally the main part of a photograph.
10 Last one. White balance.
This is a camera setting, which we’re told we should adjust to the lighting conditions around us. So, if we’re outside on a sunny day, we should go to that setting. If the clouds come over, we should go to cloudy. If it goes shady, we should go to shade. You also got tungsten and other ones like fluorescent.
That’s what you are meant to do. And that’s what everyone tells you that you should do.
I don’t do that.
I take photographs in RAW and I process them in Lightroom. So shock horror, I leave my camera on Auto White Balance and change it after the event.
Yeah, the purists will be jumping up and down at that. Pitchforks are ready to go.
And they’ll be emailing me telling me that I’m giving you bad advice, but that’s what I do. I’ve never had a problem with it. And I can change the white balance in Lightroom. At will.
10 minutes up.
That’s 10 things explained in 10 minutes. I think that was a better take than the first one which I in a fit of rage deleted.
What’s next?
What am I doing next week? Next episode, I must remember I’m doing two episodes a week at the moment. I might scale that back after Christmas.
But you never know. I am enjoying doing this.
So what am I talking about next on the Photography Explained Podcast? Well, I’m going back to what I said I was going to talk about.
Why composition is so important.
I don’t want to go straight into all the technical stuff. I’ve done a bit of that. I’ve tried to be a bit broader about things. We seem to spend all our time talking about F stops and all that other stuff when there’s a more important thing in photography which is this.
What you take a photograph of, what you put in your composition. So it’s something I really want to focus on. No pun intended – I must think of a different term than focus on.
So that’s what’s next, I might record it now. I might wait until my tongue works properly.
Okay, I’m done here.
Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for making it all the way to this point. Gold star from me for that. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned something. If you did, please leave a nice review and rating wherever you get your podcast from (it says here). And please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you could also tell everyone you know about my podcast that would be even better – best suited to the people who are interested in photography, I guess or people you think might want to get into photography.
Where can you find out about me?
Yes, I need to talk about myself briefly. You can check out my website, Rick McEvoy Photography where you can find out all about me and my architectural and construction photography work. That’s where you’ll also find my photography blog. And that’s also the home for my small but perfectly formed podcast. Well, it was. That has moved since the recording of this episode to the Photography Explained Podcast website. Last thing for now. If you want me to explain something, give me a shout.
Well, you can’t give me a shout because I won’t be able to hear you. Head over to my website, click on the podcast tile and you will see what to do. I would say fill out the form but the form is not working there.
So just drop me an email and I’ll add your thing to the list. And at some point when I get around to it I will give you a shout-out on that episode and also a link in the show notes back to your website if you have one.
The list is now live on my website for everyone. to see, I need to double-check on that before I publish this. Okay, I’m done.
This episode was brought to you by the power of Yorkshire tea. No, it’s not paid for it’s just I have a cup of tea by my side. I’ve been Rick McEvoy. Thank you again very much for listening. I really do appreciate you giving me your time. And I will see you in the next episode.
Cheers from me, Rick
OK – that was the podcast episode.
Want to know more?
Head over to the Start page on the Photography Explained Podcast website to find out more.
And here is the list of episodes published to date – you can listen to any episode straight from this page which is nice.
Let me know if there is a photography thing that you want me to explain and I will add it to my list. Just head over to the This is my list of things to explain page of this website to see what is on there already.
Let me send you stuff
I send out a weekly email to my subscribers. It is my take on one photography thing, plus what I have been writing and talking about. Just fill in the box and you can get my weekly photographic musings straight to your inbox. Which is nice.
And finally a little bit about me
Finally, yes this paragraph is all about me – check out my Rick McEvoy Photography website to find out more about me and my architectural, construction, real estate and travel photography work. I also write about general photography stuff, all in plain English without the irrelevant detail.
Thank you
Thanks for listening to my podcast (if you did) and reading this blog post (which I assume you have done as you are reading this).
Cheers from me Rick
