Lately I have been completely obsessed with photography. Googling informative tutorials, blogs, pictures, recommended books; everything. After reading through an awesome and highly recommended book, The Complete Digital Photo Manual, I felt I needed some more to contemplate on so I went out and bought a David Busch guide specific to my [soon-to-be] camera. 467 pages; It's been almost a week and I'm on page 246. This book is nice bc I can read through it and still feel like I need to study it. It's almost intimidating but if it were easy I'd be off spending more money on more books trying to improve, so I think I'm at a good place with my progress right now. Of course getting my camera in my hands would really help but at the minimum I've still got 13 days to wait until that happens. And that's assuming the IRS gets my 1040 processed in a timely manner :)
None the less, with all this reading and thinking and cramming I think it would do me some good to go back to the high school days and write "papers" on what I've learned. So starting tomorrow I will be blogging on the three most important things to master as a beginning DSLR enthusiest; Shutter speed, Aperture and ISO. Tomorrows post will be on Shutter speed. I am doing this for myself as well as to help out anyone interested in learning. As a beginner myself I can see how learning from another beginner with basic terminology would help me in understanding all this new jargon. So just as an over view I will give a quick explaination of each of the three.
Shutter Speed: Shutter Speed is the amount of time, measured in seconds, that the shutter is opened and recording light (taking a picture.) To put it simply, it controls the amount of light that enters the lens making your pictures brighter or darker. Using shutter speed also allows for motion blur to show in an image such as a person walking or car driving by as well as do the complete opposite and completely freeze fast moving objects such as athletes or the wings of a bird in flight. It's a must for sport and nature photography.
Aperture: This controls the amount of light that enters the lens, just like shutter speed, but in a different way. In your lens there is a sort of rotating disk with an opening. That disk is called an Aperture Ring. You can make this smaller or larger. Larger, obviously letting in more light than the smaller opening. It also effects the focus of an image. You can have your subject in clear focus with the background blurred out (the blur is called "bokeh") or you can change the aperture to allow for the entire picture to be in focus. Aperture is a little confusing because a smaller Aperture (f/1.8) represents a larger opening (more light, more bokeh) while a larger Aperture (such as f/11 or higher) represents a smaller opening (less light, larger portion of the image in focus).
ISO: Don't be intimidated. This is the easy one, and it also controls light; but unlike the Shutter Speed and Aperture it does not control the amount of light that enters the lens. ISO controls the sensitivity of the sensor (which records your image) to light. ISO usually ranges from 100-3200. A lower ISO creates a darker image (less sensitive sensor) and a higher ISO creates a lighter image (highly sensitive sensor), but not without consequence. A higher ISO level produces a grainier image so it's wise to work your magic with Shutter Speed and Aperture first and use ISO as a last resort.
These are just the main settings to get you started. I think the next series will be on Lighting. It will consentrate on White Balance (WB), Flash, Exposure and I might touch on HDR photography... just to keep you motivated. :)
Until then...
Looking forward to learning! :)
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