Hi Mayumi,

I tried the 55-250mm today but it didn’t work… so I’ll try to crop the image as you recommend for now until I have the budget to get a nice macro lens. Thanks for your help 🙂

Hello Kurumi,

The blurry shot might be because of the type of lens and how close you are to the subject, not the focal length. All lenses have a minimum focus distance. Meaning that each lens will only be able to get so close to a subject before it can not get a sharp focus. Regular lenses can only get so close while macro lenses allows you to get much, much closer to the subject. I suspect that you are getting too close to the subject with your lens to be able to get a sharp image.

You could try the 55-250mm lens, but you still might not get the shot you want. The cheapest option would be to shoot a wider shot that is sharp and crop into the image in post. If you have a budget, you could get a macro lens that allows you to get those close-up shots that you are looking for.

I hope that helps!

Hi Mayumi,

Thank you for the response—now the three settings make more sense. I’m using a Canon EOS Kiss X3 that I got from my dad. I have an 18-55mm lens and a 55-250mm lens, but so far, I’ve only used the 18-55mm.

Can I ask you another question if you don’t mind? I tried to take a close-up shot with the 18-55mm lens, but the main object was blurry. Should I have used the 55-250mm lens instead?

Thank you for your time!

I just noticed that this post was in the photography section. So you obviously are more interested in photo setting 😉

For photos, aperture is probably the most important decision to make. That is assuming that you have enough light to balance everything else out so that you get a clean image. Why is aperture the most important? Because it is the one setting that will change the look of your image the most. The aperture controls your depth of field. How big or small the area of focus is. Do you want everything in the frame to be sharp? Then you want a higher aperture setting like f8 or f11. Do you want the background and/or foreground to be blurry while the subject is sharp? Then you will want a smaller aperture like f4 or f2.8.

Once you decide on the look that you are going for, you can adjust the shutter speed and ISO setting. Just as in filming, you will want the lowest ISO possible, given your light source. The lower the ISO, the less grain. The higher the ISO, the more grain. In general, keep the ISO as low as possible. You can look up the native ISO for your photos for your camera as well. This should give you a good indication as to just how high you can go with the ISO before the images become too grainy.

The shutter speed sort of depends on how you are taking the photo. If you are on a tripod with a remote shutter, you can have a longer exposure to compensate in case you do not have enough light. You could literally shoot a half-second exposure (or longer) if you wanted to. But if you are shooting hand-held, then you might want to try and stay around 1/60th of a second to minimize any motion blur from shaky hands.

Think of these three settings (aperture, shutter, ISO) as a triangle. When one moves, the others have to compensate to balance.

I hope that helps!

Hello Kurumi,

Are you shooting photos or filming with your DSLR? I’ll give some input below for filming. But let me know if you are more interested in photo settings, and I can reply with input for photo settings as well.

Can you let me know which camera you are using? Different cameras have different native ISOs.

Beyond that, I would first say that you want to shoot with a 180° shutter angle. That might sound confusing, but what it basically comes down to is setting your shutter speed by doubling your frame rate. So if you are shooting at 24fps (which is what I would recommend) then your shutter speed should be 1/48 (or 50 if you don’t have 48). If you are shooting at 30fps, then you set your shutter speed to 1/60.

From there, you should then adjust your ISO to balance out the exposure. Hopefully, you will have enough light so that you won’t have to go too high with the ISO. The higher the ISO, the more grain you will introduce into the shot. This is why it is important to understand what the native ISO is for the camera that you are using. Some cameras have a native ISO around 640 or 800. While others have a dual native ISO that goes from 640 to 12,800. Most modern consumer cameras are usually good up to around 1600 but get pretty bad as you go higher. The best way to combat that and keep your footage from being grainy is to add more light. Adding light reduces the need for higher ISOs.

I hope that helps. Please feel free to reach out if you have any more questions.

Thanks!

Hi,

I just started practicing with a DSLR camera and am feeling a little overwhelmed by aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.

Lindsey mentioned that it’s better to adjust these settings in the following order: aperture -> shutter speed -> ISO.

However, in the artificial light section, I learned that it’s better to keep the ISO at 100 and adjust only the shutter speed as much as possible.

On other websites, though, I’ve seen recommendations to set the ISO higher than 100 (I think around 600, but I’m not sure).

So, my question is… which one is the correct approach? 😅 Also, if you have any go-to manual settings, please let me know!!

If your photos have retained the same quality and you’re able to keep your file size that small, that’s great! The rule of thumb we’ve been sticking to is having our images be 1200 px wide, but 1152 isn’t too far off the mark, so I think you’re fine there.

I’d recommend checking out the following blog post for more information!

Hi All,

I know that the recommended file size for images are around 200kb to 300kb, but what if they’re around 100kb, while still retaining the quality of the photo? does this have any negative implications?

I would have thought that it would be fine in any case as they’re smaller and therefore conducive to site speed.

Further, a lot of my images are 1152 × 2048 size wise – this is short of the 1,200 mark though – would this be okay to still use and upload to my site?

thank you,

Sounds great, Kurumi! I think you’ll find Lightroom to be perfect for your photo editing needs 📷

Thank you Ann for your advice! And yes, that’s exactly what I felt like… I think I wouldn’t be able to utilize PhotoShop or Lightroom Classic even if I had access to those so the extra cloud storage would be nice! So probably I’ll go with the Lightroom 1TB plan 🙂