Which Lens is Best For Me?

Today I want to talk about camera lenses, the effects they have, and hopefully help you choose which lens (lenses) you'll need for your photography.

I want to first start by giving an explanation of crop factor. What is crop factor?

Crop Factor - is the ratio from a standard 35mm film size to the size of a digital cameras image sensor (measured diagonally).

What this means is that a 35mm camera would give you a certain image with a certain lens. With a digital camera, many have what is called a crop factor because the sensor size is smaller than the standard 35mm film size. Pretend the circular image above is how the camera sees the scene. The example above is what the translated photo area would look like with a 35mm film negative as compared to a digital camera with a crop factor. This is assuming you stood in the exact same spot and use the exact same lens on both the 35mm and digital camera.

Below is how the resulting images would look:

35mm

Digital Crop Factor

Notice that the image taken with the same lens from the same spot appears to have more of a zoom effect. The key word is appears. While it appears to be more zoomed, in reality, it's just losing more off the edges. This works out well for images shot at a distance, but if you're a landscape photographer and you want a really wide angle, you're losing a considerable amount of image with a digital camera.

To make up for this, one can either buy a full framed digital camera (sensor is the same size as the 35mm film negative) or you can buy a wider lens. Since the introduction of crop factors, manufacturers have been producing lenses wider than normal to makeup for the crop factor. 28mm focal length for a 35mm film camera is considered wide. However, on a digital camera with a crop factor, it's not. Lenses with as low as a 10mm focal length have been developed to cope with the crop factor. Why not just buy a full framed digital camera? Well, if you can afford it, please do...however, these cameras are seldom found cheaper than $2500.00. A few years from now, someone may read this blog and think that price is to high, but lets just remember the price of consumer electronics drops considerably over time.

To figure out your cameras crop factor, the manufacturer has included a multiplier to give you an idea of what your lens is effectively producing on your digital camera. Below is a list of crop factors for common camera manufacturers:

Nikon - 1.5x

Canon - 1.6x

Sony - 1.5x

Pentax - 1.5x

Olympus - 2.0x

To use this information, just take the lens focal length and multiply it by the number associated with your camera above. My camera is a Canon EOS 50D. Therefore if I were to look at my 28-135mm lens, the crop factor would in effect give me a lens that appears to have a focal range of 44.8-216mm (28x1.6=44.8 and 135x1.6=216).

For the rest of this blog post, and likely throughout future blog posts, I'm going to just assume everyones digital camera has a crop factor.

So what types of lens options are available to me?

Wide Angle - Anything less than 24mm is considered a wide angle lens (less than 39mm full frame)

Normal - 25mm-37mm (40mm- 58mm full frame) On a side note, the human eye sees at approx. 32mm (50mm full frame)

Telephoto (Zoom) - Anything greater than 37mm is considered a telephoto lens (58mm full frame)

Macro - A lens that allows extreme short focus on the subject allowing for close-up photography.

Fisheye - Allows for a distorted and extremely wide angle view of the world up to 180 degrees

Teleconverter - A piece of glass that attaches between the camera body and another lens allowing you to increase the effective zoom range of your camera. A 2x teleconverter for example would double the focal length of the lens that is attached

Image Stabilized - Lenses with image stabilization use a series of gyros to detect motion from hand holding the camera, and attempts to stabilize the motion to produce a non blurry image.

all information in the definitions above are assuming you are using the 1.6x Canon crop factor. If your camera uses a different crop factor, you would need to adjust accordingly by dividing the provided 35mm film focal length by the crop factor for your manufacturer.

So lets start from the top of the list:

Wide angle lenses are great for landscape photography. They allow one to capture more of a scene into one single image. The problem with them is that the images will likely be distorted to an extent. For example, if you took a photo of someone with a wide angle lens and they were close the the camera, it will make there body look distorted. If it's a closeup of the face, the nose may seem extremely huge.

Wide angle lens - Photo courtesy of Will King Photography - All Rights Reserved

Normal lenses would be the focal range between wide and telephoto. Images in this range will be the closest to what the human eye sees. As stated above, the human eye sees at about 32mm (50mm full frame or on 35mm film). A great time to use normal lenses would be for portraits. This allows for the least amount of distortion.

Telephoto lenses are used when you can't get physically closer to your photo yet you have a need to make the subject bigger in the frame. An example might be if you were on an safari and you saw a lion in the distance. For obvious reasons, you don't want to get physically close to the lion. The telephoto lens will allow you to get closer to the subject via zoom.

Macro lenses allow you to focus extremely close to the subject. A true macro lens will have a 1:1 ratio. This means that the image is taken life size. With macro photography, you can get extremely close detail of something. An example might be the inside of a flower. You'll be able to see each piece of pollen with a macro lens.

Fisheye lenses are often times less of a necessity, and more of a luxury that is usable to give a cool creative effect. One example where they do prove very useful is shots of airplane cockpits. My good friend Michael Davis is a well known aviation photographer that sometimes uses fisheyes to capture the entire cockpit environment. You'll notice with fisheye lenses, the majority of the distortion is on the edges. The further from the center of the photo, the greater the distortion

Fisheye Lens - Photo courtesy Michael Davis AirTeamImages - All Rights Reserved

A Teleconverter allows you to add a multiplier to your current lens. If your teleconverter is 2x and you're using a 70-300mm telephoto lens, the effective focal length is now 140-600mm. With these lenses, you are reducing the amount of light reaching the sensor, thus requiring you to make up for it with a longer shutter speed, a larger aperture, or a higher ISO setting.

Image stabilization is a great thing to have on a lens. It helps prevent motion blur thus allowing you to handhold the camera at shutter speeds that are slower than previously possible. They say a good rule of thumb is to use the same shutter speed or greater for a given focal length to prevent motion blur. For example if you are shooting at 110mm, you should use 1/110th of a second. However, cameras don't use 1/110th sec, so you would round up to the next shutter speed of 1/125th. By adding image stabilization, one may now be able to handhold as slow as 1/80th of a second. This is all dependent on each person. If you naturally hold the camera steadier than the next guy, you'll be able to hold the camera at slower shutter speeds than him or her with or without image stabilization. This is a great feature if you have Parkinson's disease or some other disorder that causes hand shakes or tremors. Image stabilization will often greatly increase the cost of the lens. Often times the IS (image stabilization) feature of a lens will double its price to a similar lens without the feature. Different brands refer to IS using different terms. IS is the Canon term for the feature. Nikon uses VR (vibration reduction). Sony is a brand that includes the feature in its camera bodies, eliminating the need for it on the lenses. However, the Sony lens brand often costs more in general, so it makes up for the fact that you don't have to buy the feature on each lens.

So here's the deal: BETTER GLASS (lenses) = BETTER QUALITY

I'm not saying you can't take good photographs with lower quality lenses, but the quality of a lens definitely reflects in the final photo. Sharpness, color, fringing, distortion, etc will all be better with higher quality glass.

When buying lenses, it makes since to buy a lens first that you will use the most. If you're a nature photographer, you'll want to buy a wide angle first.

Some people don't want to lug around 3 or 4 different lenses for different functions. For this, they have designed lenses with greater focal ranges. For example, Sony now makes a lens with a focal range of 18-250mm. This lens gives you a nice wide angle, and with the turn of a ring, you can be zoomed into 250mm.

Another thing to note is to read a lot of reviews before buying a lens. Better yet, find a photo shop that rents out lenses. This will allow you to test the lens before investing the big bucks. Different lenses have different "sweet spots." A lens will usually be softer at its extreme focal lengths (18 or 250mm on the example above). This lens focal length sweet spot may be between 50 and 200mm. The other sweet spot will be in the lenses aperture. It will likely be softer at the largest and smallest aperture, and sharpest somewhere in between.

With that said, other things to consider are the lenses aperture, build quality, zoom type, color quality, distortion, color fringing, etc.

Some lenses have a fixed aperture. For example my 70-200mm Sigma lens will stay at F/2.8 throughout the entire focal range. My Canon 28-135mm on the other hand has an aperture range of F/3.5-F/5.6. This means that at its widest angle, the lens will shoot as large as F/3.5, but as you zoom, the camera changes the aperture so that by the time you reach 135mm, the smallest aperture achievable is F/5.6. The constant aperture is a great feature, but often cost more money.

Some telephoto zoom components are completely internal, meaning as you zoom, nothing happens on the outside. My 28-135mm on the other hand has external zoom components. This means that as I zoom, the lens itself actually gets longer.

All of these are factors to think about when purchasing a lens. I hope this entry helps with your future purchases. Hey! If you are photographing the Empire State building anytime soon, either stand close to it with a wide angle, or stand far away with a normal or telephoto, and you'll capture the entire building "From the Ground Up!" :)

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Hold Tight

Hey Everybody!

For those not familiar with my schedule, I work 2 weeks on and 1 week off. You'll find that you see less from me on my off week because I have photo-shoots and other things to take care. My job gives me a lot of free time during my 2 week rotation, so you'll see the more in depth posts during those weeks.

A little news from this week...

I've just returned from shooting engagement photos for a friend in Dallas, Tx. I flew down Monday, relaxed the rest of the afternoon, then did the shoot on Tuesday. It looked almost as if all hope was lost due to poor weather, but right in the nick of time, the weather cleared and the sun came out. The majority of my worries was the wind blowing over my umbrella and light stand. Anyways, the shoot was at the Fort Worth Stockyards in Fort Worth, Tx. The couple wanted to do a Southwestern theme. I think it went rather well. Above is one of the photos that I've finished editing for the couple.

A bit more news, I got to shoot senior portraits for six very beautiful women from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA. this past Sunday. It was a challenge, for it was my first big group attempt. Similar to the engagement photos, I think it went rather well. 2 photos from that shoot below.

55 photos to edit at about 30 minutes a photo means alot of time spent editing. This and poor internet at home make blogging difficult on the off week.

Stay tuned for the next lesson!

View the full post here...

Photo of the Day, March 20th, 2009

In addition to the instructional entries that this blog is and will be based on, I've also decided to add a few other types of posts. Some ideas are "Photo of the Day," "Contests," "Featured Photographers," "How I Shot This" (basically there will be a photo I've taken, then I'll explain my thought processes, techniques, settings, lighting, etc pertaining to the photograph), and anything else I can come up with that will spice up the blog. Keep an eye out!

Today's post is a "Photo of the Day"

View the full post here...

The Quickest Way To Improving Your Photography!!! COMPOSITION!

Ok, so this post is one that will apply to everyone who uses a camera. That includes DSLR, point and shoot, camera phone, whatever. By following a few basic "rules" of composition, you can drastically improve the way your photos look.

1. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo Da Vinci

2. The Rule of Thirds

3. Level Horizons

4. Natural Framing

5. Lead-In Lines

6. Is that pole growing out of your head?

7. Diagonals, Curves, and Triangles

8. Fill the Frame

9. Look into, not out of the photo.

10. Odd Numbers

11. Break the Rules

1. Simplicity

• keep it simple, stupid (KISS)
• avoid distracting backgrounds
• we've learned that a large aperture opening (small F number) can help blur a background, therefore eliminating distractions!
• get rid of unnecessary elements in your photos (anything that distracts you from the main subject)

If you look at the very beginning of the post, you'll see my example for simplicity. There's no unnecessary distractions. It's very serene and simple. It's not cluttered with objects or subjects that prevent your eye from finding the main subject.

2. The Rule of Thirds

• perhaps the most important rule in photography
• divide your photo into 1/3 sections
• attempt to place your key subject(s) on a third line, or better yet on an intersection of the third lines
• the rule of thirds gives a photo alot more compositional strength and makes it more dynamic
• with portraits, the eyes should be on a third line
• with landscapes, the horizon should be on the third line
• with sunsets, the sun should be on a third line

As you can see, both the bird is on a third line intersection and the water edge is on a horizontal third line.

With the bird centered, the photo loses a lot of interest.

The bird on the third line makes for a greater dynamic photograph.

3. Level Horizons

• this simple compositional rule is one of the most often overlooked
• a slight slant of the horizon or major line of interest can take away so much from a photo
• if you're going for an off level, or diagonal look, go extreme.
• a slight slant shows you missed it in post processing, or can show laziness
• a big diagonal makes a statement and shows that you intended to do it
• it's not always easy to get a perfectly horizontal horizon in camera, however it is a very easy fix in post processing if you have photoshop, photoshop elements, lightroom, or any other basic post processing program

The below photo has a slightly slanted horizon

Even only a slight slant makes a difference

In the following photo, the slant was fixed and the horizon was leveled

4. Natural Framing

• when you have a natural frame, use it to your disposal
• natural framing brings your eye into the main subject
• examples of natural frames may be a window or door frame, the edge of trees, strong lines surrounding the subject
• basically anything that will surround your subject and draw your eye to it

The following photo gives an example of using many natural objects to frame the subject

The edge of the trees, the rock slope, and the fence frames the old broken down shack (main subject)

5. Lead-In Lines

• look for strong or dark lines that lead your eyes into, not out of the photo.
• look for vanishing points
• examples could be: a curvy stream that leads the eye off into the distance, a straight road that disappears into the center of the photo at a vanishing point, a sea shore that curves away into the distance
• if a strong line in your photo immediately shoots out of the edge of the photo, your eye follows it and distracts from your key subject

The below photo is an extreme example of using lead-in lines that meet at the vanishing point

This photo has a curving lead line that leads your eye from the foreground around the edge of the photo to the background area

6. Is that pole growing out of your head?

• it is always strange to see an object in the background that appears to be growing out of someone or something like a mutant appendage.
• an example may be a person with a telephone pole behind him or her that's lined up in such away that it looks like it's shooting right out of his or her head.

In this example the birds lined up in such a way that it looks like this guy (or girl...I'm not sure) has 4 wings.

7. Diagonals, Curves, and Triangles

• it has been said that diagonal lines make for stronger photos, compositionally.
• curves add a dynamic element to photo composition as well
• i can't recall the source of where I first learned this, but triangles are also very strong compositional tools

This photo has a nice mix of curves and diagonals

The following portrait contains a large number of triangles

8. Fill the Frame

• pretty simple...why have unnecessary empty space in a photo if it doesn't add anything to the photo.

Alot of wasted space with boring sky

The frame is filled with little wasted space. Greater detail can be seen in the aircraft.

9. Look into, not out of the photo.

• if your subject is on the left side of the photo, they generally should be looking to the right side of the photo and visa versa.
• if the subject is on the left and is looking to the left edge, your eyes tend to follow where there eyes are going. Your eyes then shoot right off the edge of the photo.

Looking out of the photo (try to stay away from this)

Looking into the photo (typically preferable)

10. Odd Numbers

• even number (2 or 4) are weaker compositionally
• odd numbers (1, 3, 5 etc) add to strong compostion
• for example, 3 candles in a photo would make a stronger composition than 2 or 4.
• this is partially why triangles make strong compositions

11. BREAK THE RULES

• rules are made to be broken
• there's a huge difference in breaking the rules intentionally and not understanding good compostion
• an example of when to break the rules is reflections in water. Instead of putting the main line on a third, symmetry will work better thus allowing for the line to be smack dab down the center
• extreme diagonals can be a good way to break the rules
• shooting down on children or up on adults you exaggerates their height (makes kids look smaller and inferior, and shooting up on adults makes them look far to large). However, this can sometimes be a fun one to break depending on the intended mood of the photo.

Here's an example of the main line down the center and a landscape being turned diagonally.

You are all now on your way to better photos due to your now never ending knowledge of photo composition (well maybe not never ending)

I hope you've enjoyed composition "From the Ground Up!"

View the full post here...

White Balance!------ Tungsten and Sunshine and Snow OH MY!

I'm hoping I can keep this entry shorter than the rest. Again, I'm going to snag my explanation of White Balance from the post about shooting Automatic vs. Manual.

White Balance - refers to the representation of colors in your image. Different light sources cast different colors on your subject. Lets say for example you had a piece of white notebook paper on the table and it was lit by a tungsten bulb (normal lamp). If there was no white balance adjustment, the image will appear to be very warm and orangey in color due to the color cast from the lamp. Your white paper won't look so white. Lets say it was under the light of a fluorescent lamp. These lights cast a blue color on your subject. The image will look cool and blue in color. Who wants blue or orange paper...or anything in between? Well you may want a color cast if you're going for an artistic effect, but by adjusting white balance whether automatically, or manually, the camera will warm up or cool down the image to bring that paper back to a nice white color.

Ok so lets start by going through some of the available white balance settings on many modern cameras.

AWB -Auto White Balance does it's best to detect what type of lighting is present and to correct for it. (ok for most situations, but far from perfect)

- then there's all the manual settings. I'll list the names of most and it should be pretty self explanatory. You're basically just telling the camera what lighting is present.

Sunshine, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Camera Flash

There is also a Kelvin option and a Custom W.B. option.

Kelvin is typically a measure of temperature. In this case how warm or cool the photo is measured in Kelvin.

With photography, the scale we use ranges from approx. 1,000 degrees kelvin (candlelight) to 10,000 degrees kelvin (north sky [blue light]). In between we have sunshine at about 5,500 degrees, household lightbulbs at about 2,500 degrees, early sunlight at about 2,000 degrees, and overcast daylight at about 7,000 degrees. These are just a few of the light sources and an approximation as where they fall on the Kelvin scale. So by choosing the Kelvin option on your camera you can manually set the color temperature of the photo. I typically don't use this, however there are times when I intentionally want to warm up or cool down a photo. You may want to warm up a sunset or sunrise or in the example below I wanted a unique color for my sky so I bumped up the Kelvin to I believe somewhere around 9,500k.

The option I use 95% of the time is custom white balance. To achieve a custom white balance, you first need a white balance target. The one I have is made by Photovision. You'll see a picture of it below. With this type of target you basically just take a photo of the target with the white side closest to your light source, set your WB to custom, then depending on your camera, go into the menu and choose custom white balance. It will likely bring up the last photo you took (of the target) and ask if you want to use this photo to set your custom white balance. You hit ok or whatever on your camera and presto, you've just corrected those incorrect colors with amazing accuracy. There are many other white balance targets on the market. For example, one you put over the end of your lens, aim at the light source, and proceed to follow the same instructions above.

Below is a before and after of a tungsten bulb in my hotel room. I've also included a relatively white sheet of paper to see the effects on white itself. It should be noted that the before photos were taken while using the Auto White Balance function, so as you can see, AWB is faaaarrrr from perfect.

White balance target by Photovision

Before W.B. adjustment

Target photo that we use to set our custom W.B. with

A shot of the target after setting the custom W.B.

After W.B. adjustment

I want to add a quick note about snow. If you're using AWB on snow, the combination of the snows reflectivity and the actual light can trick the camera into rendering the snow blue. In some cases this can be very extreme. If you don't have a WB target, you can point the camera at the whitest patch of snow (avoid shadows), take the photo, and then use it to set a custom white balance with. You're basically telling the camera that what's in the photo is true white. From then on, your snow photos should be much more color accurate.

And there you have it. White Balance in a nutshell. (or errr "From The Ground Up!)

View the full post here...

ISO, noisy photos, and things of that nature...

First things first! Wanted to apologize for slightly lengthy posts for the first few blog entries. They should be shorter for future posts, but I first need to lay the groundwork for the basics of photography which require a bit more explanation, and thus longer posts. Thanks for your patience!

Todays topic is ISO. I'll discuss what it is, when to increase it, and the negative effects it can have.

I'm going to start by just copying and pasting my prior written definition from my second blog post...

"ISO - or International Organization for Standardization, refers to the sensors sensitivity to a given amount of light. This relates to film speed in non-digital cameras. The higher the number the faster the film. 100 being low speed, and 800 or more considered high speed film. By increasing the sensitivity of the image sensor, you are making it more sensitive to a given amount of light. So for example lets say you need to take a photograph in a dark room. You may start by trying to make the aperture it's largest possible size to let the most light reach the sensor. You may then try to make the shutter speed longer to get the light you need. Well if you have the shutter speed to slow (or open longer) you may capture the image at a proper exposure but your image will likely be blurred if you were hand holding the camera (as opposed to mounting it on a tripod). So what can you do about that? Increase the sensitivity of the sensor. By bumping up the ISO to a higher number, one can shoot at a shutter speed that wont cause any motion blur. Without adjusting the ISO, the image will look dark and underexposed. By increasing the ISO, the light that is available in the room will seem more apparent in your photos because of the increased sensitivity to light."

So we now know that if a situation occurs where it is dark and we need to handhold our camera for a shot, we can bump up the ISO to allow us to shoot at a faster shutter speed as to not blur the photo. Increasing ISO may also prove useful if you have a situation in lower light conditions where you would otherwise already have a fast enough shutter speed for handholding, but your subject is actually moving which may require an even faster shutter speed. Below is an example of this type of situation:

I was photographing a bridge opening on the York River where a boat was passing through the bridge. In the first photo I wanted to show the blur of the boat. At an shutter speed of 30 seconds, all you see is the blur of the lights from the boat. For the second photo I needed to freeze the movement of the boat so that you could still tell what it was. I quickly bumped up my ISO so that I could hopefully freeze the action. The photo didn't turn out all that well, but I think it helps demonstrate the concept (oh, and I had to use a tripod for the first photo in order to keep the bridge sharp because it's humanly impossible to handhold an exposure of 30 seconds)-

ISO-100, 30 seconds, F/9

ISO-3200, 1/4 second, F/2.8 - In this case I should have shot at an even faster shutter speed and a higher ISO to compensate. However, I was trying to avoid image noise as much as possible. We'll get into that in just a minute.

Similar to yesterdays post, I want to give you a stop chart to show what amounts of ISO represent one full stop of light.

• Low ISO, Less image noise, Lower sensitivity to light
• ISO-100
• ISO-200
• ISO-400
• ISO-800
• ISO-1600
• ISO-3200
• ISO-6400
• ISO-12800
• High ISO, More image noise, Greater sensitivity to light

it should be noted that your camera may have ISO settings between the ones listed above. again, many cameras let you increase or decrease your ISO in 1/3 stops of light where those listed above are full stops. if your camera allows 1/3 increments, 3 clicks of the ISO setting wheel will increase or decrease your ISO 1 full stop.

So now we've added a third and final way to adjust our exposure. Let's say we have our settings in such a way that your photo is properly exposed by only changing aperture and shutter speed. You can then increase or decrease your ISO one full stop and would in return have to increase one of the other two settings one full stop to maintain the same original exposure.

Example 1: ISO-100, F/5.6, 1/125

You can increase the ISO one full stop to ISO-200 (see chart above) and then change either the aperture or shutter speed one full stop. So let's increase the shutter speed for this example.

New settings: ISO-200, F/5.6, 1/250th second

Example 2: ISO-100, F/8, 1/250th

You can increase the ISO let's say 3 full stops and then decrease the aperture (or make the hole smaller to compensate for the increased sensitivity to light) 3 full stops.

New settings: ISO-800, F/22, 1/250th

In both examples you were able to change settings and end up with the same exposure.

So I'm hoping at this point you're starting to get the concept of ISO and how it effects your photograph. In that last photo, and in the chart above, you may have noticed the comments regarding image noise. What is image noise? Image noise is a negative side effect of increasing the ISO. The more you increase the ISO, the more image noise or graininess you'll notice in your photos (especially in the shadow areas).

Examples of noise at different full stop ISO settings (missing ISO-6400, accidently deleted it before uploading..again, I think you still get the idea though). In these examples I changed the shutter speed accordingly to maintain the same exposure when I adjusted the ISO. I left aperture the same for each photo.

ISO-100

ISO-200

ISO-400

ISO-800

ISO-1600

ISO-3200

ISO-12800

It should be noted that the greater the ISO and noise level, the less sharp your image will be. You can also reduce the noise in post processing with noise reduction software, but that's another days topic. If you want to get a jumpstart though, one of the best programs for this is called Noise Ninja.

So that's ISO in a nutshell. It can be a bit confusing, but the best way to learn it is use this guide and go out and play with the settings. Just remember if you've got your slowest possible shutter speed that you can hand hold and your widest aperture for the most light and you still can't get enough light....increase the ISO until you get a properly exposed photo.

There's your ISO "From The Ground Up!"

View the full post here...

Aperture & Shutter Speed (A Beautiful Relationship)

So today I want to hit a bit more on aperture and shutter speed.

As I said in the last post...

Aperture = Size of hole in the lens. Bigger hole equals more light. Smaller hole means less light. Bigger hole means shallower depth of field (less in focus in front of and behind your subject). Smaller hole means larger depth of field (more in focus in front of and behind your subject).

Lets add a bit to what we've already learned. The size of the aperture is referred to as an F-stop.

This is the confusing part... This will be tough for many people to wrap your heads around. I know it was for me at first

The larger the F-stop number (ex. F/22), the smaller the hole opening.

The smaller the F-stop number (ex. F/2.8), the larger the hole opening.

Let's lay this out in a table of sorts:

• Little number, Shallow DOF, More light
• F/2.8
• F/4
• F/5.6
• F/8
• F/11
• F/16
• F/22
• Big number, Large DOF, Less light

if you set your camera to manual and read the instructions on how to change aperture...

scroll through the numbers by changing the aperture. you'll notice there are other numbers between these that I have listed. i didn't list them because the numbers above are 1 full stop of light each. just know that you can change the F/number in smaller increments perhaps 1/3 a stop by using one of these other numbers.

So now what is a stop or an F stop?

A stop is how we measure how much light is being allowed to hit the sensor through the cameras aperture.

So lets say we shot a photo and it was really bright and overexposed. One way of fixing this is changing the size of the aperture, perhaps reducing it one stop of light (meaning a bigger F/number). This would in turn reduce the size of the aperture opening allowing less light to reach the sensor.

Shutter Speed - Length of time the shutter is open allowing a given amount of light to pass through the aperture opening to your cameras sensor. Slower shutter speed means more light. Faster shutter speed means less light. Slower shutter speed blurs movement. Faster shutter speed freezes the movement.

Again with the confusing part. When referring to shutter speed, a seemingly large number (1/1000) is actually a lesser amount of time than a seemingly smaller number (1/15). One one thousandths of a second is a very short period of time whereas one fifteenth of a second is a considerably longer amount of time. Keep this in mind.

• Small Number, Shorter period of time, Less light, Freezes action
• 1/1000 of a second
• 1/500
• 1/250
• 1/125
• 1/60
• 1/30
• 1/15
• 1/2
• 1 second
• Bigger number, Longer period of time, More light, Blurs movement

again each number in the table above represents one full stop of light. your camera settings will likely show numbers between these numbers but they are in increments of 1/3 of a stop.

So how does aperture and shutter speed relate to each other. It's rather genius really...

To keep a set exposure, but change the artistic effects, you can change either the aperture or shutter speed to reach the desired effect. If you change either of these things you will throw your exposure off soooooo: If you reduced the aperture by one stop to get a desired effect, you can increase the shutter speed by one stop to maintain the proper exposure. So what you do to one, you have to do the opposite to the other!!

Lets say you have a photo where you've nailed down the exposure. It's really great. The only problem is that the photo is blurring the movement and you really want to capture that car moving by freezing the action:

Sample Settings for desired exposure: 1/30th second & F/11

If you refer to the above table you'll see that you change your shutter speed to something more suitable for a moving car say... 1/250th of a second. That's 3 stops of light. You must then drop the F/stop down by 3 stops. The trusty table above will show the appropriate F/number to maintain your exposure is F/4.

We've just changed the artistic effect without hindering our desired exposure.

Another example:

You have a portrait and you'd like the background to be blurrier or more out of focus (OOF).

Current settings: 1/30th second & F/8

We want to make the f-number smaller or the hole larger (don't forget that trickery). To do this we may stop down the F-number to something like F/4. Conveniently F/4 is exactly 2 stops of light less than F/8. To maintain our desired exposure we should then increase the shutter speed by two stops. Trusty table above says 2 stops of light difference would be 1/125th of a second.

So again we've changed the artistic effect without changing our shutter speed.

it should also be noted that since your camera allows you to choose stops in 1/3 increments as mentioned above....three clicks of the wheel in either direction would adjust your setting 1 full stop. so if you want to decrease you're aperture one full stop you'd click the aperture wheel 3 clicks to the left. in turn, you'd click the shutter speed wheel 3 clicks to the right to maintain that desired exposure.

To wrap this up, let's take a glance at a few examples of the artistic effects available with aperture and shutter speed.

Desired Effect: Blur everything closer than and beyond our focal point (the little knob sticking out of the tree). We need a large aperture opening to gain the desired effect aka a small F/number.

F/4, 1/80th second

Desired effect: Subject (people) and background in focus. We need a small aperture opening (large number) to gain this desired effect.

F/22, 1/100th second

Desired effect: Freeze the action. We need a fast shutter speed.

F/2.8 1/4000th second

Desired Effect: Blur the movement. We need a slower or longer shutter speed.

F/4.5, 1/25th second

In conclusion: Whatever you change in either aperture or shutter speed, you must then change the other in the opposite direction to maintain a desired exposure.

This has been aperture and shutter speed "From The Ground Up!"

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