The title may sound intimidating, but it's actually the very basics of photography, so what is this Holy Trinity? They are the Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO controls of your camera. DLSRs will definitely have these attributes available for your full control, however some newer point & shoot cameras are starting to offer Shutter Speed and Aperture controls, ISO controls are available on almost all digital cameras except the very budget type.

Now let's get familiar with the three attributes that make up the most basic and fundamental controls of your camera.

Let's start off with Shutter Speed. Shutter Speed controls the time of exposure when taking a photo, and is measured in seconds such as 1, 1/30, 1/60, 1/100, 1/4000 etc. To put it in simpler terms, Shutter Speed controls how long the shutter 'door' is open to let light into the camera before the image is captured and processed. A slower Shutter Speed such as 1, 1/15 will leave the shutter 'door' open for a longer period of time, thus allowing more light to enter the camera, inversely, a fast Shutter Speed such as 1/4000 will only leave the shutter 'door' open for a fraction of time, thus not much light will be let in to the camera.

Next up is Aperture, which is the size of the opening of the camera lens. We all need lenses to focus and converge the light onto film or in this digital age, a camera sensor to capture the light that makes up a photo, and to do that the lens would need an opening or a hole to let light in. Aperture controls the size of this opening/hole, and is measured in F numbers, such as F3.5, F5.6, F7.1, F32 etc. The bigger the F number the smaller the opening is. A small F number such as F3.5 will have a big opening thus more light is allowed in to the camera as opposed to F32. Think of it as a pipe, the bigger the pipe is, the bigger the amount of water can flow through it.

The last and easiest of all is ISO, this is akin to the film speeds we have all grown used to with our old film cameras. ISO is measured in numbers of 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and even 3200! The higher the number the brighter the photo will turn out, as it increases the sensitivity of the camera sensor to light, just as how film speeds indicated the sensitivity of the film to light. Just as a faster speed film will produce grainy photos, a higher ISO will produce more noise in the photo, the digital version of film grain. So choose your ISO carefully or end up with noisy photos!

That wraps up the Holy Trinity of Photography, try playing around with the settings and see the various effects it yields, creative combinations of these three settings can produce some nice special effects, more on that in a later article! In the meantime, try to master the three attributes; Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO to get correctly exposed photos, feel free to contact me should you have questions, I will try my best to answer them.