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What Are Stops in Photography?
Kamera Express
What exactly are stops?
A stop refers to doubling or halving the amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor. You can adjust the amount of light hitting the sensor by increasing or decreasing the settings of your shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. One step, or one stop down, means the amount of light is cut in half. Moving one stop up means the amount of light is doubled. To make things a little more complicated, photography also uses 1/3 and 1/2 stops in addition to full stops. These are often called “intermediate stops.” If all of this is new to you, it may be wise to start by working only with full stops, which you can usually adjust in your camera settings. Once you become comfortable with that, you can begin experimenting with 1/2 and 1/3 stops as well.
Stops are therefore the steps you use to adjust your aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. These three settings are also known as the exposure triangle. By using stops, the three elements become comparable to one another — if you change one element, you often need to adjust another as well. Aperture, ISO, and shutter speed each have their own values and numbers, which we will explain as clearly as possible below. After all, there are a lot of numbers involved, and it’s easy to lose track of what everything means!
Which settings use stops?
As you hopefully know by now, stops are used when adjusting shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. To make things a little clearer, we’ll explain each element in more detail. Below, you’ll find more information about using stops with shutter speed, ISO, and aperture.
Shutterspeed
The term shutter speed already explains quite literally what it does. Shutter speed allows you to determine how long the shutter remains open when taking a photo. The higher the stop, the longer it takes for the shutter to close, resulting in a photo that captures more motion. Fortunately, the stops used for shutter speed are fairly straightforward. It is literally a doubling or halving of the previous setting.
For example, imagine you first took a photo with a shutter speed of 1/500, but you want to capture a bit more movement in your image. You increase the shutter speed setting by one stop, which changes the shutter speed to 1/250, since the speed is halved. If, on the other hand, you want to decrease the shutter speed by one stop from 1/500, you double the speed to 1/1000.
Read more about shutter speed here.
ISO
By adjusting the ISO value, you change the light sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the sensor becomes to light. The downside of this is that using a very high ISO can introduce noise into your photos. That is why it is generally recommended to shoot with the lowest ISO value possible.
The base ISO value is usually 50 or 100, depending on your camera, and this is also the lowest possible stop. Just like with shutter speed, adjusting ISO works through doubling or halving the value. For example, if you take a photo at ISO 200 but find the image slightly too dark, you can increase the ISO by one stop, doubling it to ISO 400. This increases the light sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. If you feel that ISO 200 is too sensitive, you can lower it by one stop to ISO 100 (halving the ISO value).
Read more about ISO here.
Aperture
By adjusting the aperture, you control the size of the lens opening. The number that represents the aperture is also called the f-number. The larger the lens opening becomes, the lower the f-number will be. Because a low f-number creates a larger opening, the lens is able to capture more light. In addition, aperture allows you to control the depth of field in your photo. With a low f-number, the background will appear blurry, while a high f-number keeps both the foreground and background sharp.
Up until now, you may have thought that stops are fairly simple, but unfortunately aperture works a little differently. With aperture, one stop is not simply a doubling or halving of the f-number. Instead, aperture works with the square root of 2, which means the value is divided or multiplied by approximately 1.41.
How does it work in practice?
Now that you know more about stops in the different camera settings, you’ll naturally want to apply this in practice. One important thing to keep in mind is that the three elements above are all connected. For example, if you adjust the aperture, you will also need to adjust the ISO or shutter speed to keep your photo properly exposed. As you now know, this is because of the exposure triangle.
For example, imagine you’ve taken a photo and notice that the exposure looks good, but the image is slightly blurry due to motion. You know that something needs to be adjusted. Since you want the image to appear sharper, you increase the shutter speed by one stop. To compensate for this change, you also need to adjust either the aperture or the ISO by one stop. If you don’t, you’ll notice that the photo becomes too dark. In this case, you could lower the aperture by one stop, allowing more light to enter. This way, the photo will remain properly exposed while also appearing sharp instead of blurry.
