The exposure triangle describes the relationship between aperture, shutter speed and ISO – all-important values in photography. They are responsible for the correct exposure, an essential criterion for the quality of your photos. In this article, you will learn what these sizes mean and how they relate to each other. You will also get to know some other terms used in photography. For example, people often talk about “stops” – but what does that actually mean? This and everything else around the exposure triangle can be found here briefly explained.

Exposure Triangle Info Graphic

Let’s start with the most important. Above you see an exposure triangle infographics, which explains the connections of the most important camera settings. As you can already see, in the end, it is mainly about the right brightness of the picture. Save this graphic on Pinterest or somewhere else digitally so that you always have it at hand. But now go on, we want to understand the graphic!

What is the exposure triangle

On the three sides of the exposure triangle, you will find “aperture”, “shutter speed” and “ISO”. If these values are well-matched, your camera will produce a correctly exposed photo. If you change one of the values, at least another one must also be changed. Otherwise, you will change the exposure of the photo and over- or underexposure may occur.

Stop!

Now let us clarify what we are talking about. Stops also called exposure levels in German, are often referred to when it comes to exposure. To obtain a correctly exposed image, we need a precisely defined amount of light that falls on theimage sensor. We can control this amount by adjusting our exposure settings by a certain number of exposure levels (or stops). More precisely, a change by one-stop always means either halving or doubling the amount of light falling on the image sensor. So if we increase by one exposure level, the image becomes brighter. The exact opposite happens when we reduce the exposure by one exposure level.

In the exposure triangle, we make all changes in stops. The practical thing about this system is that it works for different sizes of settings. But how can we even make such adjustments? Therefore we have to make adjustments to the three values of the exposure triangle.

Here is a great article about this topic.

Summary

Finally, a short summary: Adjust a setting by one stop, double or halve the amount of light reaching the image sensor. Stops can be adjusted via the three sizes ISO, aperture and shutter speed.