Photography 101 - How to Understand Camera Aperture and Shutter Speed

Image by Juliana Coutinho via Flickr

An Ezine article original, this is something is worth to be known by beginning photographers like me. Aside from reading books that I borrow from the library or buy from the bookshop, I still manage to sneak in some web reading, and what better way to share the knowledge than to share the same article that I read? So learn with me. Read on...

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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 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 may seem it a little confusing using manual camera settings, but the improvement in the quality of your pictures wil be well worth it.

Photography 101 - Learning About Camera 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 lens 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 get a good idea of what this means, make a fist, holding it in front of your eye. Then gradually open your fist. Notice when the opening in your hand is small everything you see is in focus? But when your fist is open wide, the object closest to you is sharper than the background?

A small aperture is good for taking pictures where you want it all in focus, like a landscape.

When you use your camera's Aperture Priority setting you can set the aperture to whatever f-stop number you want. These numbers represent ratios, and the larger the f-stop number, the narrower the aperture. So when the f stop setting is larger on your camera, then there will be a larger depth of field.

The reason for the "Priority" in the setting's name is that when you set the aperture, the camera does its best to set the shutter speed so that the exposure is right (not too dark or too bright). 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 shutter speeds most commonly used 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.

If you use a shutter speed slower than 1/60, you should use a tripod or some type of camera stabilizer because when the shutter is open that long, even the slightest jiggle can create fuzzy pictures.

To freeze action, set the camera's Shutter Priority to a fast speed, which is what Sports mode does. 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.

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.

Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames and loves taking pictures. Shop our online picture frame selection and see our large selection of picture frames in a wide variety of styles, sizes and unique shapes like our decorative round picture frames.

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