Weekly tips to help you increase you creativity with your camera

LEARN YOUR CAMERA

Sure there are tons knobs, and dials and settings that can be manipulated and at first these controls may seem overwhelming. Yes your camera will generally take great pics in full auto mode. But, if you can figure out how to control/ manipulate 4 major things you will be able to take your creativity to a completely new level. What are these four magical settings?

Aperture...Simply stated aperture refers to the amount of light that passes through your lens and lands on the sensor (of film if really old school). Lets keep this concept simple for now and not get bogged down in the science but just focus on why we care about light transmission. The lens on a camera has a very precise way of regulating how much light gets through. The smaller the aperture the greater the depth of field. What is depth of field? Depth of field is the distance between the furthermost and the nearest objects that are in focus. A shallow depth of field would have mostly the primary subject in focus with either a blurred blurred background and or blurred foreground, or often times both a blurred background and foreground. A large depth of filed would have not just the subject in focus but more of the foreground and background would be in focus. But, if you let in less light you must increase the exposure time and this relationship between light transmission and exposure time is proportional. But more on exposure time later.

Play around with the aperture setting on your camera and see how changing aperture can really change your composition. To change your aperture (or f stop) you will have to either go into manual mode or shutter priority mode. Don't be intimidated by all of the settings...give it a try and have fun!

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