How PhotographyWhisperer works

Tell us the light and the subject in your own words: what you're shooting, how much light there is, and whether anything is moving. “Kid running across the yard at golden hour” or “candlelit table at a wedding reception” is enough, you don't need to know f-stops or shutter speed going in.

Two details change the answer the most: how much light is actually in the scene, and how fast your subject is moving. Light ranges further than people expect, bright sun sits around EV 15 (the basis of the old sunny-16 rule, f/16 at 1/ISO), open shade drops to about EV 12, and an ordinarily lit indoor room is down around EV 5 to 7, each step being roughly one stop less light to work with. Motion matters just as much: a person walking needs a shutter speed of about 1/125s to hold sharp, a kid or a dog running climbs to around 1/500s, and fast sport or birds in flight need 1/1000s or faster. If you know your camera and lens, mention those too, depth of field and the handholdable shutter floor both shift with focal length.

You get back four values: ISO, aperture, shutter speed, and white balance, the same exposure triangle every manual camera uses, plus color temperature. They trade against each other in stops, open the aperture one stop and you can cut the shutter time in half, from 1/125s to 1/250s, or halve the ISO instead, and land at the same overall exposure. Each response tells you which of the three we prioritized for your scene and why, rather than handing you a number with no reasoning attached.

Aperture sets how much is in focus as much as it sets exposure: f/1.8 to f/2.8 isolates a single portrait subject against a soft background, f/4 to f/5.6 keeps a couple or a small group sharp, and f/8 to f/11 is where most lenses are sharpest and where landscapes typically land, moving to f/16 when you need everything in focus from a foreground rock to the horizon. ISO is the number most likely to move scene to scene: roughly 800-1600 for a lit city street, 1600-3200 for a dim indoor reception, and 3200-6400 for candlelight or a handheld night scene, climbing past 6400 only when the shutter speed matters more than a clean file.

Set aperture and ISO on your camera as given, then set shutter speed, or let your camera's manual or aperture-priority mode hold it for you. If you're shooting without a tripod, keep an eye on the reciprocal rule folded into the shutter speed we give you: roughly 1/focal length to avoid handshake blur, about 1/50s on a 50mm lens, 1/200s on a 200mm, a couple of stops slower if your lens or body has stabilization.

White balance can usually be set from the nearest preset on your camera rather than typed in as a raw Kelvin value, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, or Shade all correspond to a rough color temperature range. Shoot a test frame, check it against the scene, and adjust ISO or shutter speed by a stop if the light was brighter or dimmer than described. The reasoning behind each value is there so you can make that adjustment yourself instead of guessing from scratch next time the light changes.

That's the whole loop: describe what you're shooting, get four numbers with the reasoning behind them, dial them in. Every plan runs the same calculator, they differ only in how many scenes you can submit each month and how much history you keep, see pricing for the breakdown.