Camera Basics 101

Camera & Photography Basics: Learning About Aperture

Aperture and other technical photography basics may elicit yawns in the most fervent of budding Shutterbug but when these basic purposes are taken care of, the rest of photography easily comes into focus. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO are all features that photographers to know if you have a point-and-shoot or professional camera. This article explains the aperture and provides tips for using it to create better photographs.

To better understand Aperture, think, how the iris of your eyes get bigger and smaller to give more or less light into the pupil. Like your iris, extends the camera's lens membrane and narrows to let in more or less light. Thus the aperture determines the exposure of the image, that is how light or dark it is. The aperture also has another important feature we will look at short time.

"Aperture" refers to the size of this opening, and is measured in F stops. The smaller the F stop, the wider aperture. This is why it can be confusing. Actually F stop numbers are ratios, which is why the larger F stop number, the smaller size of the aperture.

In addition to controlling light even aperture controls depth of field. To better understand this concept, make a fist and hold it in front of the eye. Now slowly open your hand. See how the focus changes? Sure you can see more through the larger opening, but notice how when the opening in your fist was little, everything you could see was equally in focus? Try it again and notice how when you open your fist, the object is closest to you will come into sharp focus while objects farther away will be out of focus. This is how the aperture determines the depth of field, which is how much of a photograph is in focus.

If you're shooting in Auto Focus (AF), the camera will try to focus on what it sees as the main topic, but often it can not be what you want.

For this reason, many cameras an Aperture Priority setting to eliminate this problem. This allows you to set the aperture and then it automatically adjusts the shutter speed to compensate for the larger or smaller aperture. For example, if you set the aperture to a landscape that narrows it and therefore it closes less light. The camera will automatically lengthen the time the shutter remains open as your image is underexposed (too dark). Aperture Priority is not perfect, but generally how it works.

Now if you have an SLR and shoot in manual mode you can adjust shutter speed and aperture separately.

Most want a camera with preset modes such as portrait, landscape, sports, etc.

When mode is set to landscape, the aperture automatically narrows to bring everything into focus. At the same time automatically shutter speed is slower, so the shutter open longer to compensate for the small amount of light coming through the lens diaphragm.

When you switch to portrait mode and focus on one person ahead of you with the landscape in the background, the camera will bring your subject in focus, which makes the person stand out more than landscape. And it will speed up the shutter speed, so the image is not overexposed with extra light allowed in with the larger aperture.

Remember: the smaller the aperture, the higher F stop number (because it represents a relationship is not an integer) and the greater depth of field.

Understanding photo basics like aperture is super important to use the manual settings or aperture priority, but also helping them by using preset modes as well. Here are three preset modes, you should better understand:

* Portrait: How much background blur when using this feature depends on your camera and the distance between your subject and background

About the Author

Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames.com. Shop online and see our selection of 4x6 frames and 5x7 picture frames.

Minolta SRT 101 is good for a teen photographer?

I really like photography and im good at it, im good with the basics, angles, lighting, shutter speed and all that and I want to get into photography, and lately I've been using a digital camera belonging to my family / friends, I love the quality of the pictures it takes, I get the all and everything about this later, but I have searched some cameras and I am interested in the Minolta SRT 101, take only black and white images themselves? where could I get one;? would you suggest for me im 15 ... (Or you can give me other good suggestions) how much would it cost? Here are some pictures I took yesterday with my family / friends' s camera http://s678.photobucket.com/albums/vv141/dogem2pictures/

SRT-101 is anexcellent student camera. For black and white images use black and white film. For color images using color film. Read my fuller reply in Photography section.

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