Photography for Beginners

There are three important ingredients that make up great photography, shutter speed, aperture size and ISO. Combined with these is lighting, which will make or break the final quality of your images.

Shutter speed, aperture and ISO combine and work together to allow more or less light through the lens to your image sensor.

The faster the shutter speed, the less light enters, in the same way, the smaller the aperture (which has a larger corresponding number) then the less light gets to the sensor.

What Is Your Subject Doing?

If you have a moving subject, then shutter speed is the most crutial setting to get right first. Too slow and you will have a blurred subject, too fast and you will have too dark a subject or image.

Once you have a shutter speed that will freeze your moving subject then use the aperture setting to balance the light the sensor receives. If you are unable to get enough light in by making the aperture larger (reducing the aperture number) then you will need to increase the ISO sensitivity from 100 (standard) up one click at a time. This number doubles, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200 and has the effect of doubling the sensitivity to light, making your image lighter.

The down side is that with every step you will increase the ‘noise’ in the photograph which isn’t always acceptable.