Are aperture, shutter speed, and ISO stops perfectly interchangeable for the same exposure?
Asked 6/11/2014
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If I change settings to keep the same overall exposure — for example from 1/60s, f/8, ISO 200 to 1/125s, f/5.6, ISO 200 — should the resulting image be identical in brightness? Apart from the obvious differences like depth of field from aperture and motion blur from shutter speed, are there other changes in brightness, contrast, color, noise, sharpness, or lens rendering? Does this still hold if the change is several stops?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
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The intention is that the actual exposure should be exactly the same for equivalent exposure settings, but there are small deviations. There are also some other differences to the images other than the obvious (e.g. different depth of focus for different apertures).
Here are some differences that you may experience when choosing a different setting with the equivalent exposure:
Exposure
Theoretically, the exposure would be exactly the same. In practice, the measurements are not exactly accurate. The f/8 might be f/7.9, the ISO 200 might be ISO 190. Those small differences keeps the exposure from being exactly the same.
However, the differences tend to be consistent, so if ISO 200 is actually ISO 190, then ISO 400 would be around ISO 380. That makes the difference in exposure between settings smaller than the actual inaccuracies of the measurements.
Focus
With different apertures you can get a focus shift, i.e. the focus plane can be at different places depending on the aperture. This is mostly only noticable for lenses with apertures f/1.4 and larger.
Sharpness
At small apertures, smaller than the diffraction limited aperture for a specific camera, the diffraction affects the image, which will make the images less sharp.
Distorsions
All kinds of distorsions, like perspective distorsion, vignetting, edge sharpness, general sharpness, will be more or less apparent at different apertures.
Component noise
With very long exposure times (several minutes) the components in the camera heat up and can cause extra noise.
Signal noise
With different ISO settings you get different amount of noise.
Originally by user149. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user149
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
In theory, yes: one stop of shutter, aperture, or ISO is interchangeable with one stop of the others, so equivalent settings should give the same exposure.
In practice, they are not perfectly identical. Small calibration tolerances mean the actual aperture, shutter time, or ISO may be slightly off, so brightness can differ a little.
Also, each control affects more than exposure:
- aperture changes depth of field, but also lens rendering, including aberrations when used wide open and diffraction when stopped down a lot
- shutter speed changes motion blur, and very long exposures can introduce sensor noise on digital cameras
- ISO changes noise and dynamic range; higher ISO generally increases visible noise
For film, very long exposures can also cause reciprocity failure, which may alter effective sensitivity and even color balance.
So for normal shooting, equivalent stops are close enough to treat as interchangeable for exposure, but the images may still differ in sharpness, noise, blur, and lens character.
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