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.

I’m going to start you off with some good, solid tips about shutter speed, aperture, exposure, how blur can work well (not the accidental type!) and what camera you can use to get goods results in your digital photography.

Shutter speed is one of the first things in digital photography that you must know if you want to excel your skills and get beautiful digital photos. Your shutter speed controls the amount of light coming in to the digital sensor. The speed at with you get your light exposure can really make or break your digital photography.

In basic terms, to help you understand, shutter speed controls light exposure. Think of it like a door opening and closing fast or slow. How fast or slow it opens and shuts has impact on your light exposure onto the digital sensor. The shutter controls the amount of light coming in to the camera via its speed. The shutter can then make your pictures brighter or darker. Shutter speed can also impact the clarity of a moving object for example. You can create shutter speeds that are fast, giving a ‘suspended in mid air’ kind of look. Think of the motion of a fast moving object that’s been suspended in “mid-air” such as a water droplet for example. Shots like this have a fast shutter speed.

So what sort of shutter speeds do you need for a look like this? A good “freeze motion” shot where something looks suspended in time, may be at a shutter speed of 1/2000 just as an example. That means the shutter has opened and closed so fast that you can’t replicate it in sound or description. The shutter has clicked in 2000th of a second. That’s how a lot of sports photography is done. Many subjects that move very fast can look really good with a fast shutter speed.

Shutter speeds of babies and kids for example have to be taken pretty fast….unless they’re asleep of course. You need a pretty high shutter speed of babies and kids because in photographic terms they move around so fast! I’ve never been more tired after a day of shooting photos of kids and babies. You have to be on your toes because a potentially great photo is gone in an instant of a second, so you have to watch them like a hawk.

On the other hand you can get blurry images using shutter speed effects manipulation. Shutter speeds and artistic blur can work quite nicely together. For example if you want to create that artistic blurred look, (not the accidental smudge look) then some gentle blur in your photos can look beautiful. This involves some adjusting of the shutter speed to get the right look for your shot. I would call it a smudging effect if you want to get technical. You may take the same photo of the kids running, but set the shutter speed exposure to something around the 1/250 or less for example. This range of f stops may create a really nice, soft blur with these shutter speed effects.

Aperture on the other hand is described as F stops. The higher the number f stop, the smaller the opening of the lens and the less light falls on the image. For example, you may find that a dusk sunset shot is rather beautiful and you want to capture the colours as you see them. You may decide to manually change the aperture, or f stop, and open up the lens and let more light in. You may find that on auto your camera has chosen an f stop of F8. You look at the scene on the viewfinder and you find it’s just a little dark for your liking. You then switch the camera to a manual mode and change it to F4, which you find lets more light in and gives you the shot you want. Remember, the higher the F stop number, the less light comes in. The lower the number, the more light comes in.

Shutter speed and aperture in your digital photography must work together closely to create the right blend of effect in your photo. So just try it. Play around with moving objects on different shutter speeds and you’ll see what I mean about the different types of effects you can get.

So what digital cameras can you have complete shutter speed and aperture control over?

Digital Slr’s are by far better as far as controlling the amount of light that comes onto your sensor. It’s a little hard to get this control with an ordinary point-and shoot- digital camera because you can’t control the shutter speed or aperture independently. On a pro-sumer camera it’s bit better because you can change the exposure value, but still, you can’t change the shutter speed alone.

Although on a pro-sumer, you may have a reading called “e/v” which stands for “exposure value”. An “e/v number” is really a measurement of the cameras combination between aperture and shutter speed. I don’t have time to go into great explanation now but if you can change the exposure value or “e/v” you have a little more scope than the point and shoot digital camera. You can still experiment pretty well if you have one of these digital cameras. However a single lens reflex digital camera is the ideal. It allows you to control the shutter speed alone, independently, without affecting the adjustment of the aperture.

To summarise, you can get beautifully artistic shots by having a sense of what works intuitively, then couple that with a good sense of photographic technical knowledge and you are well on your way! So start with trying out different shutter speeds first and then move on to aperture, then try both.

Happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

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