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Photography 101 - Aperture and Shutter Speed Basics

By Autumn Lockwood

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 26Mar2010 Word count: 644 Viewed: 783 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

If you want to just point and shoot, then using pre-set modes (like "sports" or "macro" on your camera make it easy to get a perfect shot. 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 not sure which cameras have these types of settings, some compact digital cameras have them but most bridge cameras and all DSLRs 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. Just like your irises widen or narrow to let in more or less light through the pupils, the camera's lens diaphragm widens or narrows to let in more or less light 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 aperture also controls the depth of field of the image.

To better understand how this works, make a fist with your hand and hold it in front of your eye. Then gradually 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 numbers represent ratios, and 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. Another way to look at it is, the aperture setting will have priority while the shutter speed plays a secondary role.

Photography 101 - Introducing 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 used to be so slow that people would have to remain very still for several minutes in the early days of photography. No wonder they had such a serious look!

The most common shutter speeds today are 1/500th of a second to 1/60th of a second. The Shutter Priority setting lets you choose speeds (within the camera's range) specifically for the 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. You can be a lot more selective with this manual type of setting. 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.

When using settings like Shutter Priority and Aperture Priority you get more creative control which often means you can end up with much better pictures.

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