When you first begin using a Digital SLR, aperture and shutter speed settings can be a thing of mystery. However, a photography course online will teach you how to confidently master these key aspects. Automatic settings are fine for many situations, but imagine the power you have when you are in total control of your camera, rather than the other way round. You longer need to make do with a photograph that you believed was the best your camera could produce – controlling aperture and shutter settings means you can make the most of challenging conditions.
Basically, aperture and shutter speed settings will dictate the exposure of your photograph. Aperture is the hole allowing light through to your photo. It’s similar to the iris in your eye – the more light that is available, the more closed your camera’s aperture needs to be to control how much light comes through. Too much light leads to overexposure.
Aperture settings also affect the focus of your picture – which parts of the picture are in, or out, of focus. This is known as depth of field. A small aperture creates a large depth of field, meaning both your main subject and background elements are all in focus. Conversely, a wide aperture gives you a small depth of field, allowing you, for example, to have a subject of a portrait in focus, with the background blurred. Whilst this can seem somewhat daunting to those just beginning, a suitable photography course online will show that this is not a difficult skill to learn. Practice makes perfect, as with most things in life.
Shutter speed dictates how long the exposure goes on for. The longer the shutter remains open, the more light comes in, and the brighter your final image will be. Therefore, this element of the photograph also needs to be carefully managed in order to produce the picture you want.
Secondly, shutter speed controls how any movement is captured in your photograph. So if you were out at a day’s motor racing, for example, you would need to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action, or similarly, slow the shutter speed down if you purposely want to create a final blurred image. This trick works particularly well at nighttime. Try standing on a bridge over a busy road and capturing the traces of car headlights as the traffic passes by – although you would need to additionally use a tripod here to prevent camera shake upsetting your final picture.
Finding the correct combination of aperture and shutter settings can be the difference between an average image and a truly stunning photograph. With most modern digital cameras you can choose these automatically or set them yourself. To the novice, auto settings are fine most of the time, but a true photographer will take control of the creative process by making these adjustments manually, and a decent photography course online will successfully remove the mystique surrounding this subject.
Aperture and shutter speed settings can be a thing of mystery when you first begin using a Digital SLR. However, it is more than worth your while to consider a photography course online to teach you how to master these key aspects. Using automatic settings can be fine for many situations, but imagine the power you have when you are in total control of your camera, rather than the other way round. No longer do you need to make do with a photograph that you thought was the best your camera could produce – having control over aperture and shutter means you can always make the most of challenging conditions.
Basically, aperture and shutter speed settings will dictate the exposure of your photograph. Aperture is the hole allowing light through to your photo. It’s similar to the iris in your eye – the more light that is available, the more closed your camera’s aperture needs to be to control how much light comes through. Too much light leads to overexposure.
Aperture settings also affect the focus of your picture – which parts of the picture are in, or out, of focus. This is known as depth of field. A small aperture creates a large depth of field, meaning both your main subject and background elements are all in focus. Conversely, a wide aperture gives you a small depth of field, allowing you, for example, to have a subject of a portrait in focus, with the background blurred. Whilst this can seem somewhat daunting to those just beginning, a suitable photography course online will show that this is not a difficult skill to learn. Like most things in life, practice makes perfect.
Shutter speed is simply a matter of how long the exposure goes on for. The longer the shutter remains open, the more light comes in, and the brighter your final image will be. Therefore, this element of the photograph also needs to be carefully managed in order to produce the picture you want.
Secondly, shutter speed controls how any movement is captured in your photograph. So if you were out at a day’s motor racing, for example, you would need to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action, or similarly, slow the shutter speed down if you purposely want to create a final blurred image. This trick works particularly well at nighttime. Try standing on a bridge over a busy road and capturing the traces of car headlights as the traffic passes by – although you would need to additionally use a tripod here to prevent camera shake upsetting your final picture.
Finding the correct combination of aperture and shutter settings can be the difference between an average image and a truly stunning photograph. With most modern digital cameras you can choose these automatically or set them yourself. For the beginner, auto settings work well in most conditions, but a real photographer will control the creative process by making these adjustments manually. A decent photography course online will remove any confusion surrounding this subject.
Pre-set modes like “Sports” and “Night Portrait” make it easy for us to just point and shoot. If you’re new to photography, two of the most important things to learn are aperture and shutter speed settings as these will give you a lot of creative control. If you’re wondering which cameras have these settings, some digital compacts have them while most of the bridge (prosumer) cameras do and all SLRs have them.
At first it seems a little daunting to start using manual camera settings, but the vast improvement in your pictures will be worth the effort.
Photography 101 – Introducing Aperture
The aperture of a camera works a lot like how the iris of a person’s eye works. Similar to your irises and how they widen or narrow to let in more or less light through the pupils, the camera’s lens diaphragm narrows or widens to let in less or more light in through the lens. The aperture is the size of this opening.
Aperture lets the photographer (or the camera’s exposure computer if it’s set to automatic) increase or reduce the amount of light that gets through to the sensor, thus helping determine how bright or dark the picture will be.
The camera aperture also controls the image’s depth of field.
To get a good idea of what this means, make a fist, holding it in front of your eye. Then slowly open your fist. See how everything is in focus when the opening in your hand is small? But when it’s open wide the object closest to you is sharper than the background?
A small aperture is great for taking pictures like landscapes where you want everything in focus.
An Aperture Priority setting on your camera allows you to set the aperture within the camera’s range of f-stop numbers (or called f-stop for short). These f stop numbers represent ratios meaning that the larger the f stop number, the narrower the aperture. So the larger the f-stop number on your camera, the larger the depth of field.
The reason the setting is called “priority” is that when you set the aperture, the camera adjusts the shutter speed so that the exposure is just right. In other words, in the wider scheme of exposure, the aperture setting will have priority, while shutter speed plays a supporting role.
Photography 101 – Learning About Shutter Speed
While the aperture controls how much light at one time falls on the image sensor, the shutter speed controls the length of time the camera allows in the light.
If you’ve ever seen really old pictures, you’ll notice that they are rarely smiling. Shutter speeds were so slow back then that people had to hold perfectly still for several minutes – not to mention in all those stiff clothes they wore for picture day. No wonder they looked so stern!
The shutter speeds most commonly used today are 1/500th of a second to 1/60th of a second. By using Shutter Priority, you can then choose the shutter speed (within your camera’s range) for the exact effect you want.
For shutter speeds slower than 1/60 you will probably need a tripod or other camera support because when the shutter is open that long the camera records the tiniest jiggle, causing the photo to be out of focus or outright blurry.
If you want to freeze action (like what Sports mode does), set the camera’s Shutter Priority to a fast speed. Only with this manual setting, you can be more selective. For example, a dog sitting quietly will require a shutter speed of around 1/125 in order to freeze the small twitch in the dog’s tail. On the flip side, taking pictures at a soccer game may require up to 1/500 to freeze fast moving actions.
Using manual settings like Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority give you more creative control, which means better pictures that you can display on your wall.