Episode: 3007
Title: HPR3007: Photography 101
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3007/hpr3007.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:59:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,074 Tuesday 11 February 2020.
Today's show is entitled Photography 101. It is hosted by Paul Quirk
and is about 24 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is.
I tell you everything I know about the basics of photography.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
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Hello, good listener of Hacker Public Radio.
Paul Quirk here with my new podcast series made for Hacker Public Radio.
This episode is entitled Photography 101.
And in this episode, I will share with you everything I know about the basics of photography.
I've owned a camera for a bit longer than I've owned a computer.
My first computer was the Commodore VIC-20.
In a year before that, I got my first camera, which was the Pentex K-1000.
These are Christmas gifts to me for my parents.
I got my VIC-20 in 1984 when the price of the computer bundled with the tape drive fell to $99.
The Pentex was a used camera my father bought from his sister when she decided she preferred a simpler, more compact camera.
It came with a bag, a flash, a 28mm lens, and a 50mm lens.
My father needed the 50mm lens for his own Pentex, as well as the flash, after his own fell in a river.
And so, my gift was the K-1000 with the 28mm lens.
At this time, I would have been around 12 years old or so.
And my father was big in the black on my photography at the time, developing his own film and making his own prints in his dark room, which was also our laundry room.
I really felt as though I bonded with my father during those years, and I learned a lot from him.
At this time, he was learning more about photography himself, as he took night school courses at the local community college, with the dream of starting up his own successful photography business as a Plan B to escape his terrible boss.
To his credit, he managed to become very successful in this pursuit, and while conditions improved that his job when his boss got canned, there were years when he earned more from photography than his regular job.
I was a tall, skinny kid and very insecure. Things like photography and computers were outlets for me to escape my crushing social awkwardness and simply enjoy life.
I loved creating things. I was a Lego addict, but I also loved beautiful things like art and music.
However, I also had an overwhelming desire to fit in.
And so, when I started high school, I joined the photography club and proudly wore my Pentex to school.
Kids were cruel, and soon some of my peers were questioning why I had such a camera and why I was bringing it to school.
The stigma was that I must want to be some creepy guy taking pictures of young girls because that's the only reason why a young guy would want to walk around with an SLR camera all the time.
Because of this, I dropped out of the camera club and had my camera away, turning towards my Commodore computer as a safe way to express creativity through programming.
I still enjoyed using my Pentex, but only when helping out my father with his business or when I was alone in private, taking pictures of my cat or nature.
It wasn't until I was married and the birth of my firstborn did I regain the confidence to go out and shoot in public with 35mm SLR camera.
Today, I regret the many opportunities I miss growing up as a teenager to capture those memories.
Today, in the year 2020, I think it must be even harder for a guy to get into the art of photography.
I see the term hipster getting thrown around as a pejorative to any guy who would take a picture with anything other than his cell phone.
And to me, that's the real crime.
There are people in this world who want to judge people they don't even know so they can appear hip, trendy, funny, and popular among their peers, with little care about who they heard along the way.
As such, this is the first lesson I'd like to share with everybody.
These people don't really matter at all in your life.
They will never be your friend and if they were, they aren't the kind of friend that will help you to be the happy person living the best life that you can live.
You should feel sorry for them because if they can't crush your spirit, their own life loses its value.
If you want to take beautiful images with a nice big camera, older new, digital or film, you should do that.
And anyone who might want to put you down deserves no more than your contempt and no less than your pity.
At the same time, your cell phone probably has a manual mode and this podcast will help you get the most out of that as well.
And so, with that lesson out of the way, let's go make ourselves a cup of tea.
Go ahead and hit pause for yourself a cup, then come back and we'll continue.
Welcome back.
I just brewed myself a cup of my favorite tea.
It's red rose orange pico with a little bit of milk and honey and it is very delicious, refreshing and relaxing.
The piece you just heard is a small sample of a right-time malts called Pleasant Moments by Scott Joblin in 1909 and is in the public domain.
This performance is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 license, a link will be made available in the show notes.
So now I'm ready to get into the next lesson.
And that's the lesson about the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.
The aperture refers to the size of the opening of the lens.
In most cell phone cameras, this is fixed and cannot be changed, which is the main reason why you might wish to opt for a better camera.
In a good camera, this is adjustable across a certain range called F stops.
Think of an F stop as a measure of the size of the opening of a lens that light will pass through.
My first lens had a range between F 22 and F 3.5.
The lower the number, the bigger the opening and the more light you will let into the camera during a given period of time.
It should be noted that lenses that feature more numbers in their F stop range are generally considered better quality, more desirable lenses, both with good cell phones and with good cameras.
Now the shutter speed refers to how long light is allowed to enter the camera and is usually measured in fractions of a second.
My first camera can go as fast as 1 1,000th of a second and can go all the way to as long as I wanted with a setting known as bulb.
On bulb, the shutter would stay open for as long as I held the shutter release button.
And this is another feature that sets a good quality camera apart from a cheap camera or cell phone camera.
Now my cell phone has a pretty good camera which has a shutter speed that ranges from 1 1,000th of a second all the way down to 32 seconds.
It has a faster shutter than my first camera because it's an electronic shutter whereas my first camera had a mechanical shutter.
This is the primary method of how cell phone cameras control exposure in varying light conditions.
Now the ISO refers to how sensitive the sensor or film is to light.
Back when I got my first camera we called this ASA.
ASA stands for American Standards Association but modern film sensors are labeled by the international organization for standards.
There is no practical difference between the two as the scales are identical.
The higher the number the more sensitive the film or sensor is to light, the lower the number the less sensitive it is.
Most cell phones and other digital cameras have a range of ISOs that their sensor can use.
For example on manual mode my cell phone ranges from ISO 100 to ISO 3200.
The ISO generally doubles along the scale representing a doubling of light sensitivity.
For example ISO 200 is twice as sensitive to light as ISO 100 and ISO 800 is 4 times more sensitive to light than ISO 100.
A good DSLR can go well beyond ISO 3200 well into the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands.
Now there's a relationship between ISO shutter speed and F-stop.
By opening the lens by one stop you can increase the shutter speed by one stop and maintain the same amount of light exposure on your sensor or film.
If you increase your ISO from 100 to 200 you can then either close down your lens by one stop or increase your shutter speed by one stop and also maintain that same exposure.
This is a science of photography and has always been true all the way back to the beginning and is true whether you're shooting still photography or shooting video.
Understanding this relationship is key to taking good photographs.
An amateur might assume why not just go with the fastest ISO and leave it at that or open the lens all the way and leave it at that.
Well there are trade-offs which I will explain.
First let's talk about the trade-offs with ISO.
With film as the ISO goes up so does the light sensitivity of the film but also so does the grain.
Think of grain as the particles in the film that make up the picture.
Back in the days of film, Code of Chrome 25 with an ISO of 25 was considered virtually grainless.
However shooting below an ISO of 100 usually require the use of a tripod or expensive lenses.
The 35mm format of film or full frame as we call it was desirable because the smaller formats like the 110 format would show more grain in the pictures.
This is one of the reasons why many professionals went to the larger medium format for professional work because there would be more negative for a given size of print, reducing the grain effect for a given ISO.
Now with digital photography a higher ISO means there is more digital noise in the resulting picture.
With a good quality full frame camera this noise is usually not noticeable until up around 3200 ISO or so which is where the tiny sensor and my cellphone tops out.
Sometimes grain or noise is desirable to create an artistic effect while at other times one might wish to have the clearest photograph possible.
In the days of film photography I would use ISO 100 to shoot outdoors in 400 to shoot indoors until Fuji came out with a fantastic 800 ISO film that closely matched most ISO 400 for grain and allowed me to shoot indoors without a flash as long as I used a good lens with a low f-stop number.
For everyday use ISO 200 provided a good balance between indoors and outdoors with acceptable grain.
Today with digital I can change it on the fly but generally I try to shoot with as low an ISO as I can get away with.
Next let's talk about the trade-offs with a shutter speed.
A faster shutter speed will result in sharper pictures but only if there's enough light.
In the days of film cameras and even today with modern digital SLRs with a mechanical shutter shooting with a flash limits how fast you can shoot because beyond a certain speed the shutter and the flash are no longer in sync.
So part or even all the picture will be dark.
With my first camera the shutter synced with a flash at 160th of a second.
This improved with my second camera the Pentax P3N with a sync speed of 100th of a second.
My Pentax digital SLR improved on this further with a sync of 160th of a second.
With cameras that have electronic shutters also known as mirrorless cameras there is no limit to what you can sync a flash with which is one of the reasons why mirrorless cameras have increased in popularity.
However thanks to advancements in technology I can now shoot with a flash at speeds beyond 160th of a second with my Pentax digital SLR with the use of a flash that has a feature known as high speed sync.
Isn't technology wonderful?
Intuitively one realizes that since a slower shutter speed lets a more light why not just use that all the time.
The first thing to consider is that your pictures may turn out blurry if you shoot too slow especially if you're holding the camera instead of using a tripod.
You may want to create an artistic effect with blurring.
You may have seen this effect used when a photographer shoots a highway at night and all of the headlights and tail lights of the passing cars appear as lines of light streaming along the highway.
They would have obviously used a tripod for such a shot and a very long exposure time likely using a lower ISO and a smaller aperture for an even longer exposure.
However if you're photographing athletes in the middle of their performance you might want to freeze the action and the only way to get that is with a very high shutter speed.
So the photographer might increase the ISO and decrease the f-stop number to compensate so they can do that.
There's another factor with photography that affects both shutter speed and the effects you can create with your f-stop setting and that is the focal length of the lens.
You have probably seen this number referred to a millimeters.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast my first camera came with two lenses a 28 millimeter and a 50 millimeter.
My first digital SLR came with a zoom lens with a focal length range of 18 to 55 millimeters.
This number determines how much of the scene you can fit in a frame but also determines how slow of a shutter speed you can use and also determines how much can be in focus at a given f-stop.
Generally speaking the lower this number the wider the angle of view and the higher this number the narrower your field of view gets.
Once again there are trade-offs. The lower the number the more you can fit in the frame at a given distance from your subject but this also increases the amount of distortions that occur to make this happen.
This shouldn't be confused with film size a full frame is considered to be 35 millimeters which is the size of film that a 35 millimeter camera uses.
A 35 millimeter lens has a focal length of 35 millimeters but this is independent of measure compared to the size of frame or film you are using.
In terms of focal length a 50 millimeter lens is considered to match what the human eye sees within a certain frame.
Anything lower is considered wide angle and anything higher is considered telephoto.
In reference to shutter speed the general rule of thumb is that if you're shooting without a tripod or any other kind of stabilization you want your shutter speed to be higher than your focal length.
This meant that with my first camera if I used my 50 millimeter lens I could shoot handheld at 160th of a second but with my 28 millimeter lens I could shoot at 130th of a second.
Modern image stabilization allows us to shoot handheld at shutter speeds lower than the focal length of a lens but the rule still applies.
A wide angle lens can shoot at lower shutter speeds than can the telephoto lens.
This is why you often see photographers with big telephoto lenses using a tripod and also why wide angle lenses are favored for cell phones and low end cameras.
Now there's a more important element to consider when it comes to focal length and that is a relationship to your F stop.
The result of this relationship is known as your depth of field.
Your depth of field is what is used to describe how much is in focus in relation to its distance from the camera.
If you've ever seen a portrait where the subject is in focus and the entire background is at a focus that is because of depth of field is shallow.
As you decrease your F stop number you increase the size of your aperture but as a result your depth of field becomes more shallow.
However the focal length of your lens also determines your depth of field.
My 50 millimeter lens at F 3.5 has a shallower depth of field than does my 28 millimeter lens at F 3.5.
My 135 millimeter telephoto lens has an extremely shallow depth of field at F 3.5.
Now there's a made up word today that enter the lexicon in the late 90s by a journalist attempting to sell magazines and that word is bokeh.
Essentially this word is used to describe how out of focus a background can be.
What good bokeh really refers to is how out of focus the background really is so all good bokeh is a really shallow depth of field which you'll get with a decent telephoto lens with a wide aperture.
I generally steer clear of words invented for marketing jargon as these unnecessarily complicate and mystify the science of photography.
It's difficult for a cell phone camera to naturally create a shallow depth of field because they often make use of a wide angle lens with a small aperture.
These days this can be accomplished quite well though with softer algorithms but I still prefer using a telephoto lens to have a nice shallow depth of field whenever I want to throw the background out of focus in a portrait.
At the other end of the spectrum I prefer a good wide angle lens for landscape photography where I want everything in focus.
The final thing to consider at least with digital photography is the size of the sensor because this will affect the focal length of your lens.
The focal length of a good quality lens is measured in 35mm terms.
However many digital cameras use a sensor that's smaller than a 35mm film frame.
This means that when I use a traditional lens on my digital SLR the image becomes cropped down increasing the effective focal length by a factor of 1.5.
This means that my 50mm lens behaves like a 75mm lens on my digital SLR so if I want to maintain a similar focal length in terms of framing my pictures
I would use a 35mm focal length. In terms of using my old lenses this seems like a waste but in reality things have simply shifted for the most part.
For example the newest film Pentax in my collection is an MZ6 which came with a nice inversatile 28 to 90mm zoom lens.
My Pentax KX DSLR came with a 18 to 55mm zoom lens and when we do the math this translates to an effective range of 27 to 82.5mm which is pretty close.
Today the Micro Four Thirds is a very popular format because the lenses can be a lot smaller and yet offer the same effective focal length.
For example my wife's Olympus OMD Mark II comes with a tiny interchangeable lens with a focal length of 14 to 42mm.
Now Micro Four Thirds is smaller than the sensor that comes with most digital SLRs and is half the size of a full frame so with a multiplication factor of 2 the effective focal length is 28 to 84mm.
That was a lot of information and my cup is empty. I think it's time to brew another cup before we continue.
And that was a little more from that same regtime waltz, pleasant moments, just a nice public domain creative comments music to drink tea by. So now let's wrap things up.
The nice thing about the hobby of photography for a nerd like me is that it is built around long established standards. Things like shutter speed, f-stop, ISO and focal length mean the same thing whether you're shooting with the latest iPhone or a vintage Hasselblad.
If you asked me what camera would be best for you, I would say whatever camera you own. Some professional photographers have taken fantastic breathtaking photographs using toy cameras that you might think are an insult to the craft.
However, to the professional photography isn't just about preserving moments of time. It's an art.
Working with a camera that imposes limitations forces the professional to be more creative when it comes to composition and lighting.
Some photographers only shoot in black and white while others like to experiment with expired film stock. In art, I believe a good philosophy is to strip away anything that detracts from the art you are trying to create.
Sometimes color is the distraction. At other times, it might be too much detail. At the extreme, a fine piece of art may be a simple red line painted on a sheet of white canvas.
Now that might not be for you and it certainly does nothing for me. But knowing how to frame a shot with intent is known as composition.
If you're new to photography, you probably just want to know how to take a good picture. You have likely figured out how not to cut someone's head off.
But now their nose is smack in the middle of the photo. Or maybe your landscape picture just didn't turn out as dramatic as you envisioned it.
The secret to composition dates back to the late 1700s with paintings in the rule of thirds. The rule works like this.
Imagine there are two horizontal lines placed at one third and two third across the picture and two vertical lines also placed at one third and two thirds, creating a grid of nine equal blocks.
Many cell phones and digital cameras offer to display this grid often known as an assistive grid. The trick is to align your subject with these guidelines and their intersecting points.
A horizon will be placed either on the upper or lower line and features will be placed at points where these lines intersect.
With portraits, you would want to place the eyes on a horizontal line and the body on a vertical line.
This is the reason why some portraits where a person's head has been cut off can still look great. Once you've mastered this, you will find that you can experiment with the various points of interest to create interesting perspectives.
Well, that's it for photography 101. Of course, there's still much to learn, like when you might want to overexpose or under expose a photograph.
How to use flashes effectively and even how to take a proper light meter reading, but for now, I think that's enough to get anyone started into the hobby of photography.
In fact, I could probably go on for weeks into the minutia of the content of this podcast alone. Unfortunately, I just don't have the time and I'd really like to go out and take some pictures.
I'm going to a 5440 concert and I decided to load a roll of brand new Kodak P3200 TMAX in a very old Pentax S1A that I inherited.
If the pictures turn out, I will be posting them at my personal non-commercial blog at peacwork.com. Feel free to stop by and drop me a note. Until next time, please drive safe and make sure to have fun.
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