An Introduction to Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO for Photographers.
An easy to understand introduction to the effects of aperture settings, shutter speed and ISO for photographers. Ideal for beginners wanting to know more about photography, or digital photographers wanting to get better results from their equipment.
Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO all work together to give your exposure… metering is what gives us the figures for all of those…
APERTURE
The aperture refers to the size of the opening in the lens that allows the light through… it’s referred to as an F-Stop number, F/2.8 for instance…
The most confusing part is that the F number is actually a fraction, so the smaller the number of the F-Stop, the larger the diameter of the aperture… F/2.0 is a wide aperture, F/22 is quite narrow…
Aperture affects your depth of field – not so much on compact digital cameras, as they have a small sensor and lens size – but you have LESS depth of field (how much of your image is in focus) at F/2.0 than you do at F/8.0 – hyperfocal distances (another subject entirely) govern how deep the actual depth of field is, but it’s basically 1/3 in front of your focus point, and 2/3 behind… the closer you are to your subject, the narrower thatdepth of field will be…
Now, why do we want to change the F-Stop and the depth of field?? OK, so if we want to take a portrait, and want to make the background blurry, we want the subject slightly removed from the background, and we want a large aperture (SMALL F/ number) such as F/2.0 – For that landscape, where we want as much as possible in focus, we want a small aperture (HIGHER number), such as F/22, or on a compact digital, F/ 8.0… OK, so why all the other aperture settings?? At F/2.0, you may find not enough of your subject is acceptably focussed… not so likely with a digital compact, but still possible… hence you use the widest aperture (LOWEST F/ number) that you can to give you acceptable focus, but throw out the background…
SHUTTER SPEED
Shutter speed refers to how quickly the camera opens and closes the shutter to allow the light to expose the image…
Again, referred to in fractions of a second, 1/4 is a quarter of a second, and is a slow shutter speed, 1/1000th is one thousandth and is much, much quicker…
A fast shutter speed can freeze action, such as someone running, a car moving, or a drop of water in midair… a slower shutter speed will allow those things to blur, but will help let enough light in to get a shot in much gloomier conditions than you would need for bright daylight… a fast shutter speed also helps you take shots without things like camera shake and image blur from movement…
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