what is ev in camera

 

EV is a unit of measurement in photography, indicating the amount of light reaching your camera sensor. The higher the value, the more lights are available to hit your sensor and the more sensitive it will be to light. For example, if you take a photo with an EV of 10 and then change it to an EV of 5, areas that were dark when you took the photo will be lighter because less light is hitting your camera's sensor. If you were to increase the EV to 20, the same dark areas would be much more darker, as more light is hitting your sensor. In this review and in this article I am going to show you some of my favorite ways in which you can play with your exposure values.

What is ISO?

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ISO is a unit of measurement in photography, indicating the sensitivity of your camera's sensor. The higher amount means that whatever it's pointed at will be very sensitive to light. A low ISO number means that less light will hit the sensor and an image will appear darker than an image taken with a higher ISO. In this article I am going to show you how to play with your ISO settings. But before I get into the technique, here is a little background information.

Background information [to use as knowledge, not to be copied verbatim]

What happens when you change the EV and ISO numbers?

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On your camera's sensor there are photo diodes that measure the amount of light hitting it. Those little photo diodes are very sensitive to light so even with a small change in EV (let's say from 10 to 5) the sensor can adjust to the change in lighting by showing you a different image on your camera's LCD screen. The same is true with an ISO setting that is higher than another. There are lots of different factors that can change the number of light hitting the sensor but generally speaking, an ISO setting that is higher than your current one will show you more darker photos and vice versa.

What does this mean for me?

If you use a small aperture (small number) like f/22 then changing your ISO to 200 or 400 will not make any difference in the amount of light hitting your sensor. However, if you use a large aperture (large number), like f/2.8 then changing your ISO to 100 or 200 will help to bring the f/2.8 aperture closer and make it more influential. For example, if you use an f-stop of 2.8 in a dark situation and your ISO is set to 100, the sensor will see an EV of 16, which means that all parts of that photo are 16 EV darker than they should be. So if you change your ISO setting to 200, any part of the photo that was at EV 9 will now be at EV 16 (EV + 8) making it much darker because more light is hitting the sensor.