Cooking and Photography

You may ask , what it have to do with photography? At first you would think not much. How to explain the most important concepts of photography using the analogy from cooking!

In each dish , you put the pot on the stove or in oven, set temperatue and heat it for some time. In the end, you can get food that is cooked properly and ready to eat. Or ... if you're not so good in your assessment or not experienced, you will end up with half-cooked food and raw or cooked and burnt.

The most important concept of photography is to get proper exposure ( perfect exposure ) on your images. Exposure is basically the amount of light that allows you to reach your camera sensor. Getting the proper exposure is like cooking. You allow too much light and most of the picture will be overexposed like the food will be burned with too much heat. On the other hand, if you do not allow enough light, your picture will be underexposed as not applying enough heat to your dish will be left half done.

Safe handheld shutter speeds

Photographers usually talk about safe and unsafe shutter speeds - those where camera shake is unlikel and those where its likely. The safe shutter speed is the reciprocal of the lens equivalent focal lenght. For example: when shooting at an equiv of 30mm , we should consisder using 1/30 sec as the minimum safe shutter speed. Simple but it's also misleading. Camera shake doesnt just switch on or off at specific shutter speeds. It is always there , but at higher shutter speeds the camera movement doesnt have time to blur the photo significantly. The other factor is luck :). So safe shutter speeds are an estimate , not an exact hard number