If you don't nail the exposure of your image, no matter how good your camera might be, your videos are not going to look great. And dialing in the exposure can be tricky, but that's where the exposure triangle comes in. In this video, we're going to look at what the exposure triangle is, how to use it, and in the end, I'm going to give you some tips on how to really dial in the exposure for your videos. But real quick, before we jump into the video, we really need to define what exposure is. And in simple terms, exposure is just how bright or how dark your image is. And we really need to clarify what proper exposure is, because not everything that you film is going to be at the exact same exposure level. Exposure is a tool to help you tell a story. So if you have a darker, dramatic kind of feel to your video, then a darker exposure would be fitting. Whereas if you're filming something that's happier or maybe educational or a corporate video, then a brighter exposure might be better. And we can really utilize the exposure triangle to help us tell those stories. So now getting back to what shutter speed is, it's made up of three different components, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Now these work together to achieve a proper exposure, but they also have effects on other parts of your image, such as motion blur, depth of field, and potentially noise that's generated in your image. The first aspect that we really need to look at is shutter speed. Now on modern digital cameras, even if your camera has a mechanical shutter, for video it's going to use an electronic shutter. But it works in the same way where the longer the shutter is open for, the longer the sensor is exposed to light and therefore the brighter your image is going to be. And vice versa, the faster the shutter speed, the less time it's open, the darker your image becomes. Now the solsticell effects motion blur. So if you have a longer shutter speed, then there's going to be more blur in your image, shorter shutter speeds are going to have less motion blur. The second aspect that we need to look at is aperture, and that's the opening on the inside of the lens, allowing light to come through and hit the sensor. So a wider or more open aperture is going to let more light through and have a brighter image. And vice versa, a more closed down aperture will have a darker image. Aperture also affects what's called depth of field or how much of the image is in focus or not. And that's where we get a blurry background from. So when you hear somebody talking about a fast lens or a wide aperture, that's what they're talking about is the ability to open that up to a large size and it will give you a brighter image, but also will give you a shallower depth of field in a more blurry background. The last aspect of the exposure triangle that we need to look at is ISO. And this is just an electronic amplification of the light data that's hitting the sensor. So it's taking what's already there and amplifying it and making it brighter. The downside to this is as you raise your ISO, you potentially introduce some electronic noise into your image. And every camera is going to be a little bit different. Some are going to be able to raise the ISO higher than others without generating noise. But this is just taking some time and learning your camera and looking up the specifications online. But at the end of the day, it's really a function of getting your exposure right. I made detailed videos on each of these aspects of the exposure triangle and I'll link those down in the description. Go check those out if you want to learn a little bit more about how they affect your image and how to really dial them in to not just get your exposure right, but also affect other aspects of your image. So now let's go ahead and take a look at how we really leverage the exposure triangle to get our exposure to where we want it to be. And in video, it's really important we take the right approach to this because each of these aspects will affect our image pretty significantly. So the first thing we want to look at is our shutter speed because our shutter speed is really going to be tied to the frame rate that we're shooting in, whether that's 24 frames per second, 30 frames per second, whatever it may be, we want to set our shutter speed to be in accordance with that. Basically, if we're shooting in 24 frames per second, we want our shutter speed to be somewhere around 148th of a second. And so because this is almost a fixed number, that's where we're going to start. And there is a little bit of leeway with this. You can still have natural looking motion blur. If you raise or lower your shutter speed away from the 180 degree rule, which again, I talk about in a video I'll link down in the description. But we don't want to stray too far from that because then we can get juttery video or we can get excessive motion blur that just doesn't look very natural or very good to the viewer. But essentially what we want to do is if we feel like our exposure is too bright, then we can raise our shutter speed up to bring that exposure down a little bit. And vice versa, if we're dealing with a very dark situation, then we can slow our shutter speed down a little bit. But there's only a little bit of wiggle room here. And so we're not going to worry too much about shutter speed when it comes to exposure. So the next part of the exposure triangle we're going to adjust is the aperture. And we want to be careful with this one because it can have a significant effect on our final image. And so if we have an under exposed scene, our image is currently under exposed, we can open the aperture up wider and allow more light in and raise that exposure up. However, we want to be careful with this because it's that will start to limit the depth of field. And it can make things more difficult to keep our subject in focus. If we have multiple subjects, we're trying to have in focus that can make things difficult or even impossible. And we also want to think about set design. If we spend a lot of time having an attractive set, an attractive background behind our subject, and we open the aperture up too much, that's going to make the background very blurry and less desirable. However, this is a very powerful tool to aid in getting a proper exposure. And lastly, we're going to adjust our ISO. And the sole purpose of ISO is to adjust exposure. The thing we need to be careful of is as we raise our exposure, there is a chance of introducing electronic noise. Every camera is going to have a limit to how much you can raise that exposure. There's lots of different factors involved, the type of camera and the shooting profiles. I go much more in depth in this in my ISO video that I'll have linked down in the description. But essentially, this is your tool to get your final exposure where you want it to be after you've adjusted your shutter speed in your aperture. And one bonus tip that I've got for you that's not technically part of the exposure triangle, but is a very powerful tool and something that every filmmaker should be looking at is adding or subtracting light. Because we want to achieve a certain look with our images, as I mentioned earlier, adjusting our shutter speed and adjusting our aperture and even our ISO can have significant impact on our final image, where we can really make a big difference without affecting our image other than exposure is by adding or subtracting light. Utilizing things like video lights, the room lights, the sunlight coming through a window, basically anything at our disposal that we can use to add some light to our image can make a significant difference in the final exposure. Even adding just a small amount of light can make a big difference in how your final image looks. We also need to look at if we have an image that's overexposed and this is very common when we're shooting outdoors or in a room that has lots of windows. And so we can utilize things like flags or scrims to lessen the amount of light coming in. We can block out a window if we have a room with lots of lights that's causing overexposure. We can turn those lights off. And if we're outdoors, we can use something like an ND filter, which is essentially sunglasses that go on the front of your lens and block some of that light from coming in and allows us to keep all of our other camera settings where we want them to be, but lower our exposure. I'll link some of my favorite lights and ND filters down in the description below. So there's a lot to learn when it comes to achieving proper exposure in your videos and all the factors involved are going to affect the quality of your image in some way. By using the tips that I shared in this video and pair that up with some experimentation, you really start to get a grasp of this. But the last tip that I'll leave you with is get out and film as often as you can by practicing in different lighting environments. You're really going to start to develop a skill set and get a feel for how to dial your exposure in no matter what kind of conditions you're shooting in. So I hope you got some value out of this video. If you did, go ahead and hit those like and subscribe buttons. And let me know down in the comments if there's any videos you'd like me to cover in future videos. And I'll see you in the next one.